Atlanta a Growing Tech Hub, and Home to SAP Connected Life

When I moved to Atlanta about a year and a half ago to take on the role as RVP for the Southeast, SAP had just made its move into a brand-new workspace to accommodate our growing teams. We are the second largest SAP sales office in the US (next to Chicago), but our teams here also cover other functions, including development, marketing, and services. In fact, just about 11% of our workforce locally focuses on product development and innovation. 

This is very telling for what’s been happening in Atlanta over the past few years–we are quickly becoming THE technology and innovation hub for the southeast. We have a growing technical talent population with prominent universities like Georgia Tech and Emory who both have strong Science and Engineering programs, and they are helping pave the way for our next generation of innovators. We also have an incredibly diverse industry base. I get the pleasure to work directly with local companies that span industries—from high tech, to manufacturing, to mills and consumer packaged goods. And, we have prominent and well-known Fortune 500 companies who are based or moving here—companies like UPS, Coca Cola, AT&T, and now even Amazon is looking to grow its presence here.

SAP Connected Life

Atlanta is growing and its businesses are leading the way in digital innovation, which is why it made perfect sense to bring SAP’s first ever Connected Life forum to our office in Buckhead. When we were planning for this event we had the opportunity to leverage some best practices from our colleagues in Toronto who have put on a very successful Smart Cities summit two years in a row now.

But because we have so many different industries here, and so many customers who are not just exploring, but doing, something meaningful with emerging technologies like IoT, AI, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Big Data and Analytics, we decided to expand the forum’s focus to Connected Life—it’s the use of sensors and the proliferation of the massive amounts of data collected by those sensors to enhance absolutely everything we do, whether at home or at work, in our travel and transportation, in our cities and even across countries.

It turns out, the expanded topic of Connected Life resonated with our customers. What we hoped would be a small, intimate gathering of 40-50 people drew in 88 guests—including local government officials, universities, and students from the Junior Achievement Academy of Georgia—to listen and share how local companies are using emerging technology to deliver even greater value and more meaningful experiences for their customers. Our guest speakers during this week’s event included Dell, Technicolor, Acuity Brands, MHP-a Porsche Company, UPS, and the City of Atlanta. Here’s just a taste for what we heard.

Rethinking, Reimagining, and Disrupting 

Alan Amling, VP Corporate Strategy for UPS and renowned TED speaker, kicked off the day with a discussion on the necessity of disruption to remain relevant in the market. UPS has a 100-year history in shipping, storage, and logistics—even still, the company is actively pursuing drone delivery, 3D Printing and on demand manufacturing, making these new services both a threat and an opportunity for the UPS traditional business model.

Kirk Talbott, Deputy CIO for the City of Atlanta, talked about a number of smart cities projects he and his team are pursuing to add new services for residents, and to make the city’s operations run more intelligently. Among them is the use of sensors on residential recycle bins. As collectors complete their pickup they typically flip over the bins—the city tracked the number of flipped bins across the city to determine which neighborhoods are recycling, and which aren’t. Rather than spending money on a city-wide recycling campaign, the City opted to focus on a targeted, personalized approach to encourage only those neighborhoods with low recycling participation. The result was just what the City hoped for—a measurable uptick in recycling in targeted areas.

Acuity Brands is an Atlanta-based lighting company. Michael Heelander, VP Customer & Partner Development, says “where there are lights, there are people….and data.” In other words, the company realized it could gather important information about human behavior from its lights and lighting fixtures. Using sensors in the lights and the Delta Airlines app, the company is working on an IoT project for the Atlanta airport, which sees 300,000 passengers a day, to track the flow of traffic in key areas and buildings. How long does it take people to go through security? How long do passengers spend at a store or restaurant? Using the data they collect, the airport can now make decisions on personnel, among other things. For example, the airport knows the faster passengers go through security, the more money they’ll likely spend. They can now estimate how much more revenue per passenger is spent if they can just get through the lines a few minutes faster. Acuity is also interesting because they are a great example of a company changing its own business model through digital transformation.

Helping Solve Business Challenges with SAP Leonardo 

A recent SAP study revealed that 84% of companies surveyed understand the necessity for digital transformation, but only 3% are doing something about it. Our goal with this event was to bring industry-leading customers together to talk about not only the cool things they are doing with technology, but also, and possibly more importantly, their challenges to pursuing a full scale digital transformation.

Connected Life wrapped with a compelling open discussion about these very things that tend to get in the way of companies moving faster. SAP Leonardo demos and experts were on hand to talk about how we can help them better understand what to DO with the massive amounts of data their systems are collecting, and how to help turn that data into insights to offer new ways to serve their customers, create new business models, operate more efficiently, and possibly even launch the next big industry disruptor. We also generated a number of requests for Design Thinking sessions after the event from attendees that had the ability to reflect on current opportunities within their organizations, and were inspired by their peers’ stories. 

I don’t think anyone would disagree that our lives are increasingly more connected as more data is made available – from our phones, cars, homes, drones, watches – you name it, it’s connected - and it’s very quickly changing the way we live and work. SAP Connected Life was a way for us to scratch the surface as to what our customers are doing to more closely connect with their customers, and how SAP can help take them to the next level. It was a very successful first conversation, but it’s only just the beginning.