Building on their 27-year partnership, SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) show how they will disrupt the world of industrial Internet of Thhings (IoT).

The virtual reality video below shows how IoT makes bike riding better – and what that means for manufacturing industries.

For more than 27 years, SAP and HPE have been working together to bring businesses some of the most innovative solutions. Now they are teaming up to revolutionize the Internet of Things for industrial customers, by analyzing IoT data both in the cloud and right at the edge of the network.

What does that mean exactly? If you think about the traditional computing set up, a router sits at the edge of a network that passes information into the cloud. Once in the cloud, you can perform a variety of functions to make sense of that data like analytics, reporting, calculations and predictive scenarios. HPE is turning that router into what they’re calling “Converged IoT Systems” using HPE’s Edgeline IoT compute technology. These servers, or systems, actually do the work right at the edge of the network, delivering information – and results — even more quickly, on site.

Eventually, SAP software could be on the HPE Edgeline Converged IoT Systems, but for now, the companies are working toward that goal using SAP HANA Cloud Platform. At this stage, the HPE Edgeline system collects and sends IoT sensor information to SAP HANA Cloud Platform where it performs advanced analytics and prompts appropriate action.

This is where the bicycle example comes in.

“We wanted to bring the industrial Internet of Things closer to home to many of our joint customers in an approachable way, so we created this small-scale ‘industrial’ scenario with the bike,” said Chris Strawn, Vice President of Alliances for HPE, SAP. HPE fitted the bikes with sensors. The sensor data generated by the bicyclist’s activity is ingested by the HPE Edgeline EL1000 and sent to HANA Cloud Platform for analysis against real-time and historical data points. Employees can then monitor this data and predict equipment failure. More important, they can anticipate and prevent these problems before they impact performance.

SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are charting a path for how IoT technology will evolve. In the meantime, they’re sprinting ahead of the pack.