SAP Makes Its Next Move in the Platform Game

Systems Applications & Products announced more powerful platform capabilities and embedded intelligence in applications, setting customers on the fastest path to turn data into business value. The announcement was made at the SAP TechEd conference being held September 24–26 in Las Vegas and the Strata Data Conference being held September 23–26 in New York City.

“There is growing demand from our customers and partners to easily extend and integrate their solutions as well as build completely new apps,” said Juergen Mueller, chief technology officer and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “They also want to bring their infrastructure-as-a-service of choice. With the business technology platform, we will give customers the highest level of openness and flexibility to do this also in terms of deployment models.”

Mueller added: “By addressing the key technology markets of database and data management, analytics, application development and integration, and intelligence, SAP will deliver one of the best technological foundations customers have ever experienced.”

Unique Platform and First Solutions Now Available to Turn Data into Business Value

Customers are free to focus on business needs rather than technical building blocks when they have a complete business technology platform. By connecting business processes and experiences, customers can make confident decisions with integrity and continue to drive innovation in the cloud, on premise, at the edge and in hybrid deployment models. By offering an open platform, SAP continues to grow its ecosystem and embrace partner solutions to offer complementary value to our customers.

SAP Cloud Platform is a key pillar of the business technology platform. It is SAP’s integration and extension platform that helps bridge the gap between piloting intelligent technologies such as machine learning (ML) and the IoT and embedding them into core business processes.

• SAP Data Intelligence is the first enterprise cloud service with an end-to-end lifecycle for data management and machine learning. Technologies such as machine learning and data orchestration deliver a wealth of meaningful business insights — from understanding customer churn and consumer behavior to manufacturing predictions. Harnessing this information is often challenging when it is spread across an array of disparate tools. Using SAP Data Intelligence, customers can transform data from different sources into critical insight to drive better business outcomes. It also allows them to adapt the latest trends and technology by combining the SAP Data Hub solution and SAP Leonardo® Machine Learning Foundation into one integrated cloud offering, making use of established open source frameworks such as TensorFlow. Announced as a beta offering in May at the SAPPHIRE NOW® conference, SAP Data Intelligence is now generally available.

“With SAP Data Intelligence, we see huge potential to speed up development and operations of machine learning projects and manage the orchestration of complex data across our landscape,” said Robert Kriehs, senior solution architect, Daimler AG. “We can ensure our AI/ML projects can make it into production, the data can be managed and our models can be easily retrained, and we can apply lifecycle management to the data and the models.”

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• The SAP Intelligent Business Processes Management (SAP Intelligent BPM) bundle of services helps customers transform paper-based processes into digital workflows. Customers can now use SAP Cloud Platform Workflow, SAP Cloud Platform Business Rules and SAP Cloud Platform Process Visibility services together to create process extensions on top of business applications, orchestrate tasks or build process-centric differentiating applications. With this new transparency on workflows, customers can extend their end-to-end process visibility toward observed business processes across SAP and non-SAP applications. SAP Intelligent BPM is integrated with the SAP Conversational AI service to guide customers through workflows, giving them automatic recommendations for actions.
• Built on SAP Cloud Platform, business services that use machine learning and the IoT to address specific business challenges are now available. These include the Document Information Extraction service, which applies machine learning to digitalize unstructured business documents by extracting information and matching it with relevant business data. Enhanced capabilities in IoT edge and cloud hybrid scenarios give customers the ability to “define once, run anywhere” so they are not dependent on network latency, bandwidth or connectivity. This hybrid approach offers flexibility and scalability for customers to easily define their IoT processing artifacts once and then choose to deploy in the cloud and/or at the edge to process data.

More than 1,400 partners are building on SAP Cloud Platform, with more than 750 SAP Cloud Platform–based apps available on SAP App Center.

The latest release of the SAP Analytics Cloud solution offers enhancements to augmented analytics and analytics designer capabilities to help customers make faster, more confident decisions. Updates include:

• Augmented analytics — Updates to the search-to-insight extension give users a newly designed conversational analytics experience to better understand and use semantics across all business data. Users can now chat live with their data in SAP HANA® applications and reveal key factors influencing positives or negatives in a table of metrics with “smart insights” algorithms enabled to mine data points.
• Analytics designer — With the new data analyzer, users can now gain insights faster by using a ready-to-run service for queries in the SAP Business Warehouse application, allowing users to easily navigate and analyze information. Users can also build applications faster by creating and reusing customized widgets in a theme.

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SAP Continues to Push Blockchain Boundaries by Joining Forces with Microsoft

SAP and Microsoft Corporation announce interoperability of blockchain services in the cloud with a new collaboration. Building on their long-standing partnership, the companies aim to empower customers to run their blockchain-based applications on SAP Cloud Platform directly connected to Azure Blockchain Service. With this interoperability customers can use the infrastructure and platform services of their choice embedded in SAP software systems in an easily consumable way. The cooperation aims to enable joint customers to bring the trust and transparency of blockchain to important business processes such as material traceability, fraud prevention and collaboration in life sciences. For more information on the partnership, read Microsoft’s blog and the SAP TechEd News Guide.

Embedded Intelligence and Improved Usability for SAP S/4HANA® 

The SAP Best Practices for SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation integration with SAP S/4HANA package is now available to guide and accelerate customers’ implementations with predefined automation skills, covering key business processes such as managing sales orders and purchase order confirmations. The package offers predefined robotic automation skills such as finance, sales distribution and procurement, as well as capabilities for industries such as professional services and manufacturing. Customers can use the package to help reduce labor-related costs and improve response time to market changes and other business requirements.

The latest release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud includes intelligent approval workflow in procurement for purchase requisitions. The service uses machine learning to classify important and unimportant purchase requisition approvals by weighting them with a confidence factor arrived at by analyzing the approval pattern history based on price, source of supply, material group, approvers and attachments. It also guides users to approval items that require immediate attention, which frees up time to focus on critical work items.

Quartz light, the new theme in the SAP Fiori® 3 user experience, is used by the latest release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and all other SAP applications. Designed and developed by all SAP product teams, SAP Fiori 3 offers a more consistent and integrated experience across the entire SAP portfolio. This helps decrease training time, increases application effectiveness and provides consistency of use across devices from anywhere. Embedded artificial intelligence in SAP Fiori 3 provides intelligent home pages that show everything a user needs to focus on, and supports proactive business situation handling, which offers explanations, insights and proposed actions.

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