This blog is to discuss new applications building on SAP HANA platform and this one will discuss one of today’s hottest topics, applications for IoT. We are all foreseeing a new connected world where sensors and networking chips are everywhere. In this world, everything is digitized – from light bulbs, to human body, to industrial equipment – and real-time data continuously flows across the network and through software systems. Applications that harness these data flows can greatly transform the way we live and do business. These IoT applications will allow us to create unprecedented new personalized offers and services, innovative business processes and models, and greater business opportunities. For example, adaptive logistic applications can leverage sensors that deliver geospatial information on trucks, trains, and vehicles movement to help business optimize operations at their logistic hubs, with predictive maintenance on capital equipment or for real-time fleet management. SAP does provide multiple ready to use IoT solutions today, and in this blog, I will focus on how SAP HANA advanced data provisioning technology can help you develop new IoT application to satisfy your unique business requirements.

Two of the most fundamental characteristics of IoT applications are the “continuous data input” and the size of the data generated. Additionally, not all data is relevant and as such it needs to be selectively processes and stored. SAP HANA advanced data provisioning technology help your applications cope with these new data-flows. We actually introduced SAP HANA advanced data provisioning technology to adapt to different scenarios in the previous blog.   The following diagram shows different options, such as a real-time data replication among relational databases (SAP Replication Server), complex and high-performance extract, transform and load operations (SAP Data Services), and data exchange with Business Suite (SAP Landscape Transformation), all used together. In this blog, I want to emphasize the following two features:

1. Smart Data Streaming : As mentioned, not all streaming data is useful, but it is typically critical to process and store out-of-range data immediately. For example, if a patient’s pacemaker data suddenly shows an irregular heart beat, the nurse might need to take immediate action.  In such situations we should process the data before storing it.

SAP HANA provides smart data streaming component that allows the processing of high-velocity, high-volume event streams in real time. Specifically with smart data streaming your application can filter, aggregate, and enrich raw data before storing it into your database. Depending on the situation, the filters you can apply to actively monitor the data streaming can be very simple or include complex set of rules that aggregate or correlate incoming events. In this way, you can truly take advantage of live streams of data and implement continuous intelligence solutions.

With SAP HANA smart data streaming, you can accept data input from a variety of sources including data feeds, business applications, sensors, IT monitoring infrastructure and so on. It also provides you a Continuous Computation Language (CCL), which is a script language that helps you express complex patterns in a simple way.

Moreover, your application might need to visualize incoming data in real-time to a live operational dashboards to provide continuous insight into current conditions. SAP DesignStudio provides the streaming data plugin that allows you easily build a bar chart or line chart for streaming data.  Now, you can show high frequency data (miliseconds) on a dashboard with simple or complex analytic algorithms while the data is streaming in. Of course, often it is also useful to store sample data into SAP HANA and analyze them in conjunction with historic data to provide deep insights.

2. SAP Remote Data Sync:  In some situations, sensors are not connected all the time to the Internet and applications have to find ways to store data at the edge of the network and periodically synchronize it with other data stores for consistency. For example, with big drill devices used in the underground wells, what can we connect devices when network is unreliable. So, IoT applications might need to interact not only with incoming streams but also with a number of different applications that deal with streaming data locally and store streaming data in remote data repositories.  Efficiently moving data between SAP HANA and other applications or data stores is critical.  This remote data sync capabilities recently released in SPS10.  This feature leverages SAP SQL Anywhere/Ultralite databases to capture data at thousands of locations at the edge of the network and provides transaction consistent data synchronization to SAP HANA database. In this way your IoT application can easily support offline operation mode.

Let’s take a look the flood monitoring use case that was presented at the 2015 SAP HANA Innovation Award.  You can find the complete story fromhere.  This SAP HANA solution “digitizes” the river. It consolidates sensor data from various sites such as reservoirs, dams, canals into SAP HANA to monitor the river in real time. And then SAP HANA enrich the sensor data with map data and visualizes it in a central dashboard.  This application enables the state irrigation department to centrally monitor, analyze, forecast and manage flood situations. The system can also automatically alert the administration and the population about probable occurrence of a flood event.  What a great story how SAP HANA technology is used to help people’s life!!!

“Currently, sensor data from 4 major river basins across roughly 1000 sensor points is collected into SCADA servers and pulled into HANA platform every 5 minutes. Automatic alert notifications are calculated in case of a threshold breach and predictive algorithms are used to forecast a flood situation based parameters such as rainfall, water level and discharge levels.” Pretty amazing, right?