5 Important Announcements for SAPinsiders

SAP TechEd took place this week in Las Vegas, unveiling several developments for the SAPinsider community – not the least of which being SAP’s and Microsoft’s joint announcement that Microsoft Azure Blockchain Service and SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain Service will be interoperable.

During his main keynote, which outlined SAP’s business technology platform strategy for the Intelligent Enterprise, SAP Chief Technology Officer Juergen Mueller managed to sum up many of the major developments emerging from SAP TechEd. Mueller, who manages SAP’s overall platform for technology and development, along with other presentation contributors, unveiled these five key announcements to applause from the SAP TechEd crowd:

• Embedded machine learning: By the end of 2019, SAP will offer more than 200 cases of machine learning embedded into SAP applications (not including SAP Qualtrics applications). It is already infused in SAP S/4HANA, SAP C/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, and SAP Concur solutions – with most of the SAP application portfolio soon expected to have machine learning embedded.
• Introducing SAP Graph: SAP engineers developed a virtual semantic data model called “SAP Graph” – a one-stop-shop for SAP data with a consistent format, exposed to users as a single application programming interface (API) layer. This solution removes the challenges of having to work with many different APIs across the intelligent suite by offering a unified API layer, which can be used by any application running on SAP or non-SAP technology. A demo from the show floor with Steve Wilson, Head of Products at Citrix, showed a micro application that uses SAP Graph to access multiple SAP back ends, pulling and prioritizing live data from different SAP systems into a workspace with a unified user experience.
• SAP Data Intelligence: This new solution, which is an evolution of SAP Data Hub and SAP Machine Learning Foundation, is now in general availability. With SAP Data Intelligence, which combines data management capabilities with an open-source environment, customers can manage the end-to-end life cycle of their machine learning projects and confidently develop, deploy, and operate machine learning models at enterprise scale.
• Alternative SAP Cloud Platform agreement and pricing: SAP has announced it is simplifying its commercial model and offering more flexibility by extending its SAP Cloud Platform enterprise agreement to cover all cloud solutions in the portfolio, such as consuming SAP HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud and related services (when in general availability) using one commercial contract. In addition, SAP has announced (starting in October 2019) the availability of a true pay-as-you-go, consumption-based model for all solutions included in the SAP Cloud Platform enterprise agreement, which is now all solutions in this area.
• Blockchain integration with Microsoft Azure: Those companies in the supply chain and logistics industries are looking to use blockchain services to aid in their digital transformations by adding trust and transparency across their SAP applications and across larger consortiums of companies to transact in a trusted manner. Announced at SAP TechEd, SAP’s blockchain integrated application portfolio will be able to connect to Microsoft Azure blockchain services, which enriches this set of offerings and capabilities and enables SAP customers to bring trust and transparency (and the benefits that blockchain brings) to their most important business processes like material traceability, fraud protection, and collaboration.

To summarize the value of SAP’s business technology platform, Mueller says it makes it easier for customers to consume SAP technology by bringing together SAP Cloud Platform, SAP HANA, and SAP Analytics Cloud. “SAP has always been the leader in end-to-end processes, and we will continue our focus on harmonization from data models to the user experience,” he said. “Intelligence, embedded analytics, and machine learning make it easy for customers to become data driven — and turning insights from X data and O data into action will close experience gaps.

For more on the happenings at SAP TechEd 2019 or to watch replays of the keynotes, lectures, and interviews, visit here.