Kraftwerk and SAP digital leaders
In part one we reprised how Kraftwerk and SAP innovated and influenced electronic music and business applications. In part two we compared changes in Kraftwerk and SAP digital licenses. Florian Schneider, one of the founding members of Kraftwerk who recently passed away, was also a leader in the MDR movement (material demand reduction). SAP was also a leader in the MRP movement (material requirements planning) and is today in sustainability. Florian was passionate about stopping plastic pollution, he created and played this piece of music at Parley in Paris. Please play this video
SAP expects carbon footprint software to have a ‘ripple effect’ … some of the world’s largest corporations will ultimately be “forced” to install a new software suite that can measure and analyze the carbon footprint… via FT.
Against this backdrop of climate change and sustainability, Corvid-19 has demonstrated we need flexibility for resilient manufacturing (turn commercial toilet paper rolls into household rolls).
Here we anticipate a move to connect or federate businesses. Nowadays this means consumers and small businesses use electronic payments while big businesses arrange long term contracts with electronic data integration while middle-sized businesses are often inefficient because interfacing businesses is still very costly.
Cloud computing makes integrating manufacturing and eCommerce with connected data more robust and scalable. To do so requires separating security from the functionality. Such as checking keys on the database for user seats and other traditional software licensing attributed and associated with some other metering of usage. Kraftwerks music streamed from iTunes or played on YouTube includes digital rights to compensate the creators. Businesses are likely to adopt MDR with MRP and connect to many servers to optimize planning details for supply and demand. Amazon fulfillment likely performs dozens of optimizations.
Many SAP customers will need to connect their business systems to services that perform these optimizations. Separating functionality from security and from the applications layer and database layer will allow the streaming of data from SAP systems and metering and securing the data as if we were playing a Kraftwerk track. The name given to this class of business systems is a Splinter application. It provides a set of distributed services that can communicate with each other across a Splinter circuit (nodes at different businesses).
“Splinter is a privacy-focused platform for distributed applications that provides a blockchain-inspired networking environment for communication and transactions between organizations. Splinter lets you combine blockchain-related technologies — such as smart contracts and consensus engines — to build a wide variety of architectural patterns.
Indicates digital business applications will be streaming data for supply chain touchpoints. Here’s an example of splinter integration by Fujitsu Labs https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337208507_ConnectionChain_Secure_Interworking_of_Blockchains
Fine-grained data usage will need digital licensing integrated into the core. We imagine evolving the programming languages of the ABAP server from objects to object-capabilities. Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML), a smart contract language created by Digital Asset Holdings revealed to ACM that finely grained object-capabilities are required when working with blockchain DLTs (digital ledger technologies). https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/9/238966-daml/fulltext
The technical evolution of an integrated privacy-focused platform could involve private data objects, PDO research by Mic Bowman, and the team at Intel Labs. It is now open-source with collaboration underway to benefit Hyperledger projects, where we are contributing to the architecture working group. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.05686.pdf
Deno a new programming language for scripting complex functionality based on industry standards has recently been released. Deno code is executed in a secure sandbox by default, for finely grained security https://deno.land/v1
As Shai Agassi, CTO SAP in 2005 predicted open source and distributed computing would set in place changes to requiring a new digital licensing. Kraftwerk’s catalog has been digitized for streaming on music platforms. Satoshi Nakamoto combined digital ledger technologies — blockchain, cryptographic, and web technologies to create bitcoin and inspire Ethereum. Now the future of business applications is in transforming the core, innovation inspired digital platforms carrying Kraftwerk’s catalog.
— Clive Boulton (@iC)
A coda: Kraftwerk and SAP platforms
