SAP SE and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) (NYSE: NTT) announced a partnership enhancement in co-innovation, global partnership and global reference.

SAP and NTT are collaborating to develop a solution combining a connected transportation safety solution from SAP that collects and analyzes vehicle-related data with NTT's hitoe®, a sensing fabric jointly developed with Toray Industries, and the NTT Internet of Things (IoT) analytics platform, which transmits drivers' biological data including heart rate and mental fatigue estimates. The project aims to provide more accurate and real-time information about vehicles and drivers' conditions.

In cooperation with Keifuku Bus Co., Ltd (Fukui, Japan), SAP and NTT will conduct a field trial starting October 2016, with the goal of providing service by January 2017. The companies will roll out this solution in the United States and Europe.

"We are honored to partner with NTT Group, which runs the world's biggest data centers," said Robert Enslin, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE and president of Global Customer Operations, SAP. "This partnership gives SAP a significant ability to broaden customers' choices for facilitating digital transformation. The integration of NTT's cutting-edge technologies and SAP's revolutionary solutions will generate momentum to elevate the overall market to the next level."

Jun Sawada, senior executive vice president of NTT, said: "NTT wants to contribute to business transformation for its enterprise customers by providing quality, value-added services with partners. A global partnership with SAP is a significant step to strengthen our competitive edge. This partnership will help NTT enhance capabilities to support our global clients, and can accelerate digital transformation of industries."

This co-innovation project started in Palo Alto, California, and has been led by both NTT Labs and SAP Labs China. SAP and NTT Group plan to extend the collaboration in other areas with new technologies and through global marketing promotion.

Both companies are also accelerating their cooperation in private managed cloud solutions, such as the SAP HANA® Enterprise Cloud service, using NTT´s world-class global data center network. NTT is also an SAP® Pinnacle Award winner for 2016, named an SAP S/4HANA® Adoption Partner of the Year.