Roads? Where SAP is Going, They Aren't Going to Need Roads.

It’s been a big few days for SAP as it makes a major move into the connected vehicle market by bringing cloud services to the wheeled world.

The company announced its SAP Vehicles Network solution, a new cloud offering designed to help enterprise companies deploy secure, convenient, end-to-end vehicle and mobility services. The idea is to tie consumers’ vehicles to the cloud to better serve their needs, and set the company up for future autonomous mobility.

SAP Vehicles Network enables drivers in North America to share data from the Internet of Things, activate gas pumps, pay at the pump, reserve parking, open off-street parking gates and pay for on-street parking from the car through a mobile wallet or app. The company announced the connected car platform at SAP TechEd, held October 19 to 23 in Las Vegas.

“We were trying to tackle problems that have an impact on any one of us,” said Gil Perez, SVP, IoT & Customer Innovation and GM, Connected Vehicles, SAP. “So we wanted to figure out a way to not be a bystander and have a global impact.”

SAP Vehicles Network harnesses the power of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform for the IoT by helping member companies and partners to build new mobility services and apps for consumer use. The new digital mobile user experience solution is designed to have impact on GPS solutions, mobile payments for enabled parking garages and gas stations by pairing with mobile wallets and third-party apps for an integrated in-vehicle experience. The payment features came out of a partnership with Samsung Pay.

“We are pleased to partner with SAP to bring Samsung Pay to fuel pumps in the future,” said Dr. Injong Rhee, EVP, Samsung Electronics. “Samsung Pay is accepted today almost anywhere you can swipe or tap your card, and we are always looking for ways to extend where consumers can use the service to everywhere they shop.”

Partnerships like the one with Samsung Pay are critical to making this solution work. SAP knows it, too, so it has teamed up with Volkswagen AG, Shell, VeriFone, Toyota Info Technology Center U.S.A., BMW, Fidelity National Information Services, ZipLine and P97 Networks to deliver the mobile pay-at-the-pump experience. SAP also worked with parking aggregators including ParkWhiz and Parking Panda to help drivers find enabled parking, and Intelligent Mechatronic Systems offers connected car services for usage-based insurance and road charging with SAP Vehicles Network.