At the Sapphire Now conference in Orlando last week, SAP announced new products and partnerships to enable enterprises to become more intelligent, with expanded capabilities from advanced technologies like conversational artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and analytics. SAP also announced that SAP Cloud Platform is now available on all major cloud infrastructure providers.
The Internet of Things platform launched a year ago, Has also extended its technical capabilities for customers to embed cutting-edge technologies into their processes to improve workflows and make enterprises more efficient.
The new products and services include the following. Information as upplied by SAP:
· SAP Conversational AI enables companies to develop intelligent chatbots. The service includes a powerful end-to-end toolkit for training, building and monitoring chatbots. These chatbots can be integrated with SAP and non-SAP systems and are available as preconfigured industry-specific bots. So far, users have built 60,000 SAP Conversational AI chatbots. France’s railway company SNCF and telecommunications provider SFR already are using SAP Conversational AI to improve customer service and target younger audiences.
· SAP Leonardo Machine Learning capabilities are now embedded in applications across the SAP portfolio, including SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP C/4HANA and SAP Ariba solutions.
· SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation, which allows customers to develop individual applications, has five new services, including object detection, text recognition in images and text classification, which analyzes and automatically categorizes text documents. It now supports the software library scikit-learn, in addition to TensorFlow.
· SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain is a new blockchain as a service enabling enterprises to easily build and extend business solutions with blockchain technologies, such as Hyperledger Fabric and MultiChain. About 65 companies participate in the SAP blockchain co-innovation initiative to help customers use manufacturing and supply-chain products augmented by blockchain to enhance transparency, safety and collaboration in industries such as transportation, food, and pharmaceuticals. To ensure quality, U.S. sausage maker Johnsonville LLC is using blockchain to trace the origin of products across the supply chain.
To expand and accelerate global adoption and best practices of blockchain in the transportation industry, SAP has started a global blockchain consortium with seven founding members, including Intel Corp., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) and A3 by Airbus SE.
To help customers easily embed advanced technologies into their solutions, SAP released SAP Leonardo-based innovation kits for specific industries, including retail, life sciences, manufacturing and automotive. SAP also launched the SAP Leonardo Partner Medallion Initiative, an SAP partner service that has more than doubled the number of SAP Leonardo embedded industry solutions.
SAP Cloud Platform Takes Multicloud to New Dimensions
SAP continues to expand and enhance its multicloud strategy with the general availability of SAP Cloud Platform on Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. With these additions, along with Amazon Web Services (AWS), SAP Cloud Platform is now available on all major hyperscale cloud infrastructure providers. Only SAP delivers this single enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) with such flexibility, openness and choice.
SAP also intends to release SAP Cloud Platform, private edition, on IBM Cloud as a private cloud deployment. The joint solution will allow clients in regulated industries such as banking, healthcare and transportation, as well as those managing sensitive data, to have the flexibility, speed and agility to innovate without jeopardizing security and control.
Delivering on its promise to offer customers choice in mobile app deployments, SAP is also releasing the SAP Cloud Platform software development kit (SDK) for Android. It allows customers to access sophisticated workflows through any Android or Chrome OS device, bringing a familiar, easy-to-use mobile experience across iOS and Android apps.
SAP Analytics Cloud Innovations Enable the Intelligent Enterprise
The expanded capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud are now directly embedded within SAP S/4HANA Cloud to ensure organizations can plan, execute and analyze in one system, breaking free from spreadsheet proliferation or stand-alone tools. Customers include leading recycled paper and packing company Pratt Industries, aerospace and defense company L3 Technologies and Daimler AG. Additionally, SAP Analytics Cloud now delivers contextual news feeds.
SAP Analytics Cloud extends access to over 150 cloud data sources, so customers can easily access, blend and gain insight from their data, no matter where it resides. The combination of machine learning and natural language query (NLQ) technology augments human intelligence, leading to faster, more accurate results and greater business agility. The new feature “search to insight” uses conversational AI to quickly provide insights into data by answering ad hoc questions in natural language on any device.
Other enhancements to SAP Analytics Cloud include prebuilt content and business logic for more than 20 SAP products, including SAP SuccessFactors®, SAP Ariba and SAP Hybris solutions and SAP S/4HANA, to embed analytics where users work. These capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud can be embedded into SAP line-of-business applications to power the intelligent enterprise.
