Everything You Need To Know About SAP's New-Look Leonardo Platform

SAP has relaunched its Leonardo platform as a "digital innovation system", as it seeks to allow customers to take advantage of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, advanced analytics and blockchain on top of their business data. SAP Leonardo was originally released in January as an IoT platform, giving customers a place to track sensor data from connected assets and start to gain insight quickly. Now SAP wants to give customers a simple way to embrace all of these emerging technologies to solve specific business problems, before packaging them up for non-early adopters to procure later on. So instead of just helping customers embrace IoT with a cloud system and a set of templates, SAP has expanded Leonardo to the whole spectrum of enterprise problems. As Mike Flannagan, senior vice president of analytics at SAP put it: "Leonardo is about accelerating time to value by finding generalised, common business problems across an industry. "It's about taking a business problem, which is specific to one customer, find the elements of that problem which are common across the industry, then defining the elements of a methodology, the technologies used to solve that problem and package those up and make them available as an accelerator for the next customers" It can be tricky to find a working definition of SAP Leonardo at this point because it is an umbrella term for a number of SAP technologies, all built on top of its open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering called SAP Cloud Platform. Speaking during SAP's annual Sapphire event in Orlando, Florida this week, cofounder and chairman of the SAP supervisory board Dr Hasso Plattner called Leonardo a "bounding box" which sits around "a set of objects.