Spotlight on SAP: Ankr’s Strategic Partner
Introduction
There’s a lot of information about Ankr on their company website and in the telegram channels; mostly about the innovative technologies being used, and how the project is likely to revolutionise the Cloud Compute space. This is wonderful… but honestly, Crypto is full of great ideas; almost every project I read about, there’s something I love about it. This makes it really hard to find a project to truly invest in; there’s so much choice currently; so how can we differentiate between all of these wonderful potential investments?
Making an informed choice
Well for me, the most important thing after a great idea and technology is real-world utilisation. It’s my belief that this will drive which coins live and die over the next 12–18 months. The Crypto space can only really grow once we see an up-take in real-world adoption.
And this, for me, is what sets Ankr apart; even before MainNet, we can see a number of exciting strategic partnerships — the collaboration with Berkeley to utilise Boinc is a perfect fit, however it’s still in the realms of academia for the investor. No; the really exciting partnership is with an enterprise-software market leader: SAP.
What is SAP and how does Ankr fit?
Most people should have heard of SAP; an enormous modular system covering virtually every element of business management. SAP is the fourth largest software company in the world, and Ankr is one of their partners! This is massive!
So how does Ankr fit with the SAP platform? Well the intention is to offer Ankr in the SAP App Centre to be utilised on the platform in areas such as SAP HANA — a data analytics module. The usage there could be in using Ankr’s cloud compute power to accelerate (or entirely drive) the data analysis of time-series data. I’ve worked with massive time-series datasets myself and can therefore appreciate the significance of being able to ‘flick a switch’ to reduce time needed to achieve results.
Of course, to do this effectively, the customer should not need to be exposed to the difficulties of acquiring a crypto-token in order to utilise the service; I speculate that Ankr intend to implement a cross-charging model with SAP whereby SAP purchase the compute-credits via Ankr tokens and charge their customers Fiat for utilisation of the Ankr compute services. Again — this is tremendously exciting; the fourth largest software company in the world will be buying up Ankr tokens so that their fortune-500 customers can use the Ankr system!
Wrapping up…
For me, this is one of the most significant partnerships in the entire crypto-space — if any mature project announced this, it would be enormous news. The fact that Ankr has this already, even before token generation, speaks volumes about how seriously the project is being taken by the big players in the business-software world. For me, this single partnership alone is reason enough to accumulate Ankr when you can, and to hold long term to see this project reach its full potential.
About the author: Jamie Badman is a keen crypto-enthusiast who’s worked in the IT software industry for over 30 years and is currently an IT manager, application architect and UX consultant working for Deutsche Bank in London, England.