The IoT universe is like the Milky Way—a hazy band of lights composed of multisource IoT services and features that are difficult to distinguish. SAP simplifies edge-to-core management by offering SAP Edge Services, on-premises edition. For more information, go to the SAP Help Portal. For customers with a large SAP landscape in their data center, the on-premises edition of SAP Edge Services offers Dynamic Edge Processing application programming interfaces (APIs). Developers can use the following APIs to pull IoT data into ERP applications for SAP Business Suite:
- Plant Maintenance
- Inventory Management
- Materials Management
These services accelerate the integration of IoT data into existing SAP applications.
SAP Leonardo is an edge-to-cloud solution with significant investment by SAP. In the edge-to-cloud model, IoT data is placed in the cloud. This model is a good fit for early-stage businesses or projects in which the need to accelerate IoT analytics and development is of paramount importance.
The on-premises edition of SAP Edge Services is the pathway for customers that have identified the edge-to-core model as the futuristic approach. The benefits of the edge-to-core model include:
- Greater control over security
- Protection of business processes and IP
- Quick integration of IoT data into existing on-premises SAP systems
- An experienced in-house SAP developer team that understands the company’s business models and can integrate IoT data more efficiently
- An experienced analytics team that understands schematic processes that are unique to the business and can push analytics to the edge to analyze internal IoT data efficiently
- Reuse of existing artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and data analytics tools to optimize investments and team experience
- Ability to participate in a data virtualization strategy in which in-house IoT data is used with disparate data sources for improved analytics and reporting
- Reuse of existing storage including Isilon scale-out storage, Spark or Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) storage, and other low-cost scalable storage systems
- Avoidance of the high cost of moving big data such as IoT data from the cloud to the core
SAP Edge Services are microservices that use the computing resources of Dell EMC Edge Gateway systems. Microservices are designed to deliver business capabilities. Each service communicates with other services, and collectively they form SAP Edge Services. Three services are available through this set:
- Persistence service
- Streaming service
- Business essential functions service
Persistence service
The persistence service provides two options for saving IoT data to gateways:
- An Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) bundle uses the Local Generic SQL Database (LGSD). In this persistence approach, a developer creates an OSGi bundle, commonly called a plug-in. The bundle is a specification that defines how to interact with existing services such as the LGSD. A Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is used to publish and bind the services within SAP on-premise services. Customers can use OSGi to define how to save data to the LGSD and which data is transmitted to the core.
- The Automated Edge Storage of IoT data service automatically saves inbound device and measurement data. Two data retention settings manage the amount of data that is automatically saved: age and size. The age setting enables customers to change the number of days that data is saved from the default of 30 days. The size setting enables customers to change the rows per measure type saved from the default of 50,000. Developers can use both Java APIs and REST APIs to access the data from the database. LGSD and the Automated Edge Storage of IoT (read-only) data can be accessed through the JAVA API, allowing the joining of tables between the SQL database and IoT data.
Streaming service
The streaming service supports the following outbound connectors:
- RESTEnterprisePlugin2
- WebSocketEnterprisePlugin2
- IoTServicesEnterprisePlugin
- MQTTEnterprisePlugin2
- SDSEnterprisePlugin2
- HDFSEnterprisePlugin
The SAP Edge Service administrator can access the streaming service edge console from https://localhost, the gateway where SAP on-premise services are installed. From the web console, the administration can configure the following options:
- Sensor profiles and rules
- Rules and rule types
- Actions
- Rule data sources
- Events
- Logs security
- Settings (advanced feature)
This document explores one of these configuration options for actions that transmit data when they are triggered by rules. For example, the Create Field Service Call action integrates with SAP C/4HANA Field Service Management. Action-specific attributes such as subject, priority level, problem type code, and others are communicated to the external Essential Business Functions server to create a field service call. Other supported actions include:
- Create Incident Report
- Create Work Order
- Create Field Message
- Create Sensor Message
Essential Business Functions Service
The Essential Business Functions Service consists of APIs that are accessible through web services. Developers using these APIs can develop edge applications that transmit data to SAP Business Suite. The APIs enable the edge applications to work with the SAP Plant Maintenance, Inventory Management, and Materials Management modules.