SAP has kicked off its ‘Innovation on the Move’ roadshow. This will tour Central and Eastern Europe – though its first port of call is Walldorf in Germany (SAP’s headquarters).
The tour will spend the several months travelling by truck across the region. It will visit customers, partners, universities and trade fairs to showcase an array of smart innovations and use cases for the intelligent enterprise.
“Blockchain or the Internet of Things might be common jargon these days, but the technologies and concepts behind them are still quite abstract for a lot of companies,” said Hartmut Thomsen, president, Middle & Eastern Europe Region at SAP.
“I am pleased that we can bring these new technologies and their use cases closer to the customer with the Intelligent Enterprise tour. We want to make our customers’ digital journeys as smooth as possible as they transition to intelligent enterprises.”
Innovation on the stationary move
Visitors can learn how they might implement technologies such as blockchain or machine learning in day to day situations. Exploration of the added value of each innovation should make the possibilities to businesses curious about how they might use them.
The tour truck houses a full replica of the ‘SAP City’ room — a 23×17-foot space with an interactive 360-degree experience including voice control and touch wall. Visitors will be able to assess what interests them, through industry-specific live demos and scenarios.
The objective is for what SAP calls a “one-of-a-kind digital transformation enlightenment”. Interested customers can team up with SAP experts in the innovation lab to develop a prototype for a selected use case in just five days.
That inaugural stop in Walldorf present solutions from Velotics and Anki Overdrive:
- the Velotics demo shows the potential of digital transformation based on a fictitious bicycle manufacturer that can tap into collected data to remind customers about service intervals
- the Anki Overdrive one brings connected mobility and the racing world, with the SAP Vehicle Insights application and SAP Race Analytics mobile app.
What does this mean
In one sense this SAP Innovation on the Move is more unremarkable marketing, until you consider its geographic destination: Eastern and Central Europe. By taking technology, and especially blockchain, to the customer, or would-be customer, and for sufficient time in each place to experiment rather than just demonstrate, those interested can make progress on problems which might otherwise seem too remote.
The tour represents a new step for SAP – in terms of digital brand experience. Until now, the SAP City room was only available in Walldorf. On the Intelligent Enterprise tour, SAP brings this to other cities and countries.
