OREANDA-NEWS. February 24, 2016. The camp is managed by the CIO Center for Digital Leadership team at SAP, initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and organized by the Anwendungszentrum GmbH Oberpfaffenhofen (AZO). Startups and young talents representing five countries across Europe and Asia were challenged to develop apps on SAP HANA Cloud Platform that utilize Earth observation (EO) and business data to support the future of retail, construction, agriculture, climate and farming. The announcement was made at Mobile World Congress, being held February 22–25 in Barcelona.

“It is truly inspiring to see what these teams were able to achieve,” said Dr. Carsten Linz, global head of SAP’s CIO Center for Digital Leadership. “SAP’s innovation fast-track approach used at the Space App Camp can help startups and young university talents to successfully manage their ability to innovate and shape the future of the digital economy. The approach helps make the showcases productive, scales them internally within SAP and evaluates new commercialization options, creating new opportunities to incubate digital innovation and paving new ways for doing business.”

SAP HANA Cloud Platform provided a unique in-memory database and business application services for the teams to quickly build, extend and integrate modern, mobile-enabled apps with ESA’s accurate, timely and easily accessible EO information, in particular Copernicus data.

“I was impressed by the ingenuity and dedication of the five competing groups of developers,” said Prof. Volker Liebig, ESA’s director for Earth Observation Programs. “The results are another showcase of Earth observation data facilitating the daily life of the citizens and spurring the economy.”

The final round of the Space App Camp challenges five top startups out of several dozen evaluated teams from the ESA startup network. Each team, composed of two to four members and supported by SAP and ESA experts, demonstrated how EO and business data can be used to run the world better in the areas of retail, construction, agriculture, climate and farming.

The team members participating in the Space App Camp represented Germany, Greece, India, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and competed for the “Best App of the Space App Camp” prize. The winning team, BuildingRadar, won €5,000 and will be considered for the SAP Startup Focus program. As part of its ongoing collaboration with ESA, SAP intends to work together with the startups incubated in the ESA Business Incubation Centres across Europe, through which ESA supports over 400 startups making use of space technology and space data. This collaboration aims to provide SAP with access to hundreds of new ventures.

The CIO Center for Digital Leadership was recently created to help manage digital transformation showcases at SAP as well as its approach to customers. The organization helps drive digital platform–based innovation in an open ecosystem with SAP employees, student teams and startups by putting the leader at the center of everything and addressing digitalization holistically.