Essential Guide

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Editor's note

Defining SAP Leonardo can seem as challenging as deciphering The Da Vinci Code. It doesn't help that SAP's positioning of the brand has evolved over the years -- from the original IoT emphasis to a 2017 relaunch as a "digital innovation system."

But SAP Leonardo is hardly a system in the usual IT sense, nor is it a true platform. Instead, Leonardo is an umbrella brand for an impressive array of SAP emerging technologies for AI, big data analytics, blockchain, IoT and 3D printing. In theory, Leonardo can be the foundation for an organization's digital transformation, and the company offers a design process, deployment platform and prepackaged industry processes to get there.  

This guide provides expert analysis as well as case studies from early adopters to help make sense of an otherwise confusing product offering and address the major challenges to integrating SAP Leonardo technologies.

1Deciphering Leonardo

Fundamentally, SAP Leonardo is a collection of SAP's most bleeding-edge technologies, all of them depending on the cloud for compute power, user access and integration. Specifics on how to implement Leonardo have been a moving target, so it's vital to have a good understanding of what's available now, what's coming later and the key role of SAP Cloud Platform and public cloud alternatives like Microsoft Azure.

2Early users tell their stories

While implementing the entire holistic vision of SAP Leonardo technologies remains elusive -- and perhaps impossible -- some SAP users are implementing Leonardo's major components. Blockchain and machine learning chatbots are the most common technologies first tackled by early adopters.