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SAP, maker of enterprise application software, is deepening its relationship with Amazon Web Services through new AI-focused integrations. The first concerns the AI Core platform: SAP is adding support for the Amazon soil AI development service, which creates opportunities for companies, especially those in regulated industries, to experiment with generative AI.
Additionally, SAP announced it is doubling down on AWS chips to power its infrastructure. The company will upgrade its Graviton chips and plans to strengthen its Business AI offering using AWS Trainium And Inference.
“AWS was the first cloud provider certified to support the SAP portfolio, and today thousands of enterprises run SAP solutions on AWS to get the most out of their business-critical applications,” said Matt Garman, The new CEO of AWS, says in a statement. “Now AWS and SAP are making it faster and easier for companies to apply generative AI to their core business data to become more efficient, responsive and sustainable.”
Bringing Gen-AI to more enterprises
AI Core is part of SAP's Business Technology Platform and enables customers to manage their AI assets in a “standardized, scalable and hyperscaler-agnostic manner.” The integration of Amazon Bedrock means these organizations now have access to a litany of supported major language models, such as Amazon TitanAnthropic Close 3 WorkCoheres family of Command R models, Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7BAnd Meta's llama, Stable diffusionAnd AI21 Laboratories.
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“We have a flexible and open architecture,” says SAP's Chief AI Officer, Dr. Philipp Herzig, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We have a wide range of partnerships… we want to select the best technology for the right purpose.” He goes on to say that Amazon Bedrock has “some of the best models that our customers also ask for” and offers a “wide range of models that we as developers in SAP, but also our customers, can choose from to build our own models . experiences, as well as their adapted experiences.”
This means business developers can leverage top-performing LLMs to improve key business processes built on SAP. For example, Amazon Bedrock can be used for improvement S/4HANA from SAP Central Finance, which streamlines the audit process by linking bank statements to accounts.
“I think it's fair to say that I certainly haven't seen this level of excitement, investment, momentum and energy from customers around any technology, probably since the very early days of AWS itself,” said Matt Wood, vice president president of AWS AI products. , comments to VentureBeat. “Our business customers are taking very conscious steps. They are moving generative AI into some advanced prototypes; they move on to production. And those production use cases are getting closer to the core of their business.”
While AWS is gaining new traction for its AI development platform, the SAP integration is significant because of the types of companies that use SAP's enterprise resource planning applications, namely those in regulated industries. It's a space that Woods admits may seem counterintuitive, but is embracing gen AI faster than the average corporate company.
He credits compliance organizations such as the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Pfizer, Merck, the District of Columbia Department of Health, those in the travel and insurance industries, life sciences and the public sector for driving the requirements “needed to be successful with generative AI.” “They have the data quality in order; they have data security in order; they have the right data approach for their data strategy. This makes the use of generative AI a lot easier than in other organizations.”
Wood says that regulated companies have large amounts of text data, which can be optimized using AI, and that they “have a lot of use cases internally” where gen AI can “really make a dent.” He believes these organizations have been largely left on the proverbial sidelines during their digital transformation, neglecting areas such as gaming, media, transportation, hospitality and travel. Gen AI can be seen as a tool to “catch up to the Joneses” and overtake them.
SAP customers can use Amazon Bedrock within the company's Business Technology Platform (BTP) or its managed cloud offering RISE with SAP.
Powering AI with AWS chips
In addition to its partnership with Amazon Bedrock, SAP is expanding its use of Amazon chips to power its AI infrastructure. Specifically, the HANA Cloud, created for intelligent data applications, will be upgraded from Graviton3 to Graviton4 chips. In addition, SAP says it will use AWS Tranium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy future SAP Business AI products.
“Using Trainium and Inferentia2-based instances in a proof of concept, SAP engineers trained and refined Generative AI LLMs in two days, compared to 23 days with comparable Amazon EC2 instances,” AWS boasts in a release. “By leveraging Trainium's specialized architecture designed for efficient ML model training, SAP can accelerate the development process while maintaining a high level of accuracy and reliability.”
As Herzig explains, SAP is looking for purpose-built chips to reduce energy consumption, lower costs and improve performance. He sees AWS's Graviton4 as a “leap forward, in terms of price, performance, [and] for database and enterprise workloads.” The new chips will be used to support SAP's BTP, Datasphere, Analytics Cloud and the company's Cloud ALM solution.