ESA and SAP look to World Space Alliance
With the launch of Sentinel-3B, the first set of Sentinels for Copernicus is now in orbit delivering an almost mind-boggling amount of data. While this wealth of information advances environmental monitoring, it also opens up huge business opportunities. To help bring these data to market, ESA and SAP have joined forces to create the World Space Alliance.
ESA and SAP first teamed up two years ago to close the gap between traditional Earth observation and the digitalised business world.
Building on this fruitful partnership, the two organisations today signed another agreement to strengthen the use of digital technologies and Earth observation data for a range of business sectors.
Josef Aschbacher, Director of Earth Observation Programmes at ESA, said, “Data from the Sentinels are, of course, open and freely available to everybody, but through our partnership with SAP we are working on making data products that businesses can easily tap into.
“Earth observation data are now part of everyday life, used for a myriad of applications. But as well as delivering data, we need to make them even more convenient as actual products for the world of business.
“By creating the World Space Alliance, ESA and SAP are merging what they do best, which is the generation of first-class satellite data and the analysis and processing of big data.”
Carsten Linz, Business Development Officer at SAP and Global Head of SAP’s Center for Digital Leadership, stated, “With the World Space Alliance, we pave the way to new innovative business and societal scenarios such as digital farming, wildfire and landslide hazard prediction, and the improved planning of smart cities.
“We will bring together the power of space-related stakeholders including providers of satellite and drone data, spatial algorithms, and space software applications for start-ups, corporations, universities and research institutes.
“With today’s agreement, we are on track to build the leading ecosystem for spatial and business data and the first business-ready spatial platform in the cloud.”
The World Space Alliance will be powered by the SAP Cloud Platform. In turn, ESA also benefits from the platform’s big-data handling and dissemination capabilities.
The data it uses will come primarily from the Copernicus Sentinel missions, but also from other satellite missions that contribute to Copernicus.
