Bringing salvation to an unsettled market? Leonardo and CEC

Many of our customers are still unclear as to what exactly Leonardo is all about. According to SAP, Leonardo is intended to "keep companies on track in the new digital renaissance and pave the way to becoming a digital company".

Buzzwords such as machine learning, the Internet of Things, blockchain and data intelligence are already being lined up, while critics such as Crisp Research recognized nothing more than "a vague announcement" in the expansion of the SAP IoT portfolio as recently as last July. As is so often the case, the truth lies somewhere in between.

It's true: anyone expecting technical innovations in the form of superlatives will have to be patient - at least when it comes to our core business of Customer Engagement and Commerce (CEC).

SAP Leonardo is not a revolutionary new development, but rather the bundling of existing technologies and methods - a kind of bounding box that will continue to be filled in the coming years.

It is important to know exactly what is already possible with it today and what is not. For example, the machine learning application for Hybris Cloud for Customer is part of Leonardo and is currently only available for the Enterprise Edition.

It is also easy to see that although the technological prerequisites for a "real" automated process are in place, the path to achieving this still involves conceptual and manual effort.

The example of a complete IoT scenario - communication between a machine and an application, consolidation of data for analyses or subsequent processes with subsequent use in other systems such as CRM or marketing automation - makes it clear that various steps and considerations are still necessary to implement this with Leonardo.

Questions on issues such as data streaming, edge computing, scalability and data storage in particular are still partially unanswered or require individual answers, depending on the customer, business model and target process - the implementation partner is much more decisive here than the solution.

The process in terms of planning, provision and access data is still bumpy in some cases. There is real pioneering work to be done here. Nevertheless, the potential is clearly recognizable, with a tendency for SAP to become more transparent here as the number of projects increases and more features are made available in a mature form.

This is why most of the scenarios named under Leonardo for the CEC area in 2018 will still be of a pilot nature. We have already implemented the first projects. However, we are noticing the relevance of the topic in all of our areas - whether sales, service, marketing or commerce, even if the topic is more explosive in other areas such as production and logistics and technologically more mature scenarios are available.

To understand the clear advantage that Leonardo also offers our customers, we need to take a look at the past two years. Buzzwords such as digitalization and Industry 4.0 have recently flooded the market, spreading one thing above all: confusion and unease.

Leonardo now combines all digitalization topics such as machine learning, IoT and data intelligence under a new term that has positive emotional connotations. This approach now serves as a starting point for further developing the digital strategy - without panic, but with confidence in a new technology that combines all requirements.

Because one thing is also clear: all technological changes in the context of Industry 4.0 and the digitalization of customer processes will probably take place under the SAP Leonardo umbrella in the future, because the term bundles the technologies and services that bring great added value in terms of processes.

My assessment is therefore that it is worth analyzing the actual requirements of your own company in detail. Based on these findings, you should then establish the right processes for your own business model and - depending on what is necessary - use the SAP Leonardo functionalities.