Over the past couple of years, SAP Research has been continually developing its vision of how the Internet can reach out to the real world of physical objects. The Internet of Things fuses the digital world and the physical world by bringing different concepts and technical components together: pervasive networks, miniaturization of devices, mobile communication, and new models for business processes. Applications, services, middleware components, networks, and endpoints will be structurally connected in entirely new ways.

The Internet of Things will bring tangible business benefits, such as the high-resolution management of assets and products, improved life-cycle management, and better collaboration between enterprises. Improved sensor and device capabilities will also allow business logic to be executed on the edges of a network – enabling existing business processes to be decentralized for the benefit of performance, scalability, and local decision-making.

The research field for Internet of Things addresses the needs of many industries and sectors. One out of many examples in this context is the Global Brand Protection Service (GBPS) developed by SAP Research that enables legitimate parties along the value chain, such as brand owners, distributors, retailers, and consumers of products with services, to:

• Distinguish between genuine products and counterfeits by using security techniques and product markings that cannot be copied without being detected
• Detect anomalies indicating illegal parallel trading activities, the injection of stolen or diverted products into value chains, etc., by analyzing enterprise business data managed by SAP applications, such as SAP ERP and SAP SCM

First scenarios have already been productized and are now part of the SAP solutions for governance, risk, and compliance (SAP solutions for GRC), helping SAP customers protect their revenues, intellectual property rights, R&D investments, and brand value against plagiarism and illicit trading practices.

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A new SAP white paper that SAP co-CEO Henning Kagermann presented to EU Commissioner Viviane Reding explains why software will be the driver of the next generation of the Internet. Read "Toward a European Strategy for the Future Internet" (PDF) to learn how SAP is calling upon European industry and policy makers to collaborate and develop a European strategy for the Future Internet – and is fully committed to taking a leading role in a collaborative effort to ensure that Europe reaps the full benefits of the Future Internet.