SAP has been on a jour­ney or two this decade. SAP HANA has grown and expe­ri­enced aug­men­ta­tions and enhance­ments. SAP Leonar­do has gone through sim­i­lar ele­va­tions. And SAP prod­ucts in gen­er­al are get­ting bol­stered, boost­ed, and var­i­ous­ly bun­dled into a com­bi­na­tion of indus­try-spe­cif­ic offer­ings designed to accel­er­ate dig­i­tal transformation.

As SAP nat­u­ral­ly expands and enhances its prod­ucts and plat­forms, the com­pa­ny has now shift­ed to plac­ing what is an arguably high­er lev­el of empha­sis on the SAP Cloud Plat­form. SAP has announced more pow­er­ful plat­form capa­bil­i­ties and embed­ded intel­li­gence in all appli­ca­tions that use its plat­form. Now though, as we look to fin­ish the year, SAP is also explain­ing where its busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy plat­form stands in this mix.

The com­pa­ny has gone as far say­ing that oth­er ven­dors’ data­bas­es could and should run on its cloud, if that is the customer’s data lay­er of choice. Equal­ly, SAP CTO Juer­gen Mueller has said that cus­tomers should be able to bring their infra­struc­ture as a ser­vice of choice to the mix. There is a new open­ness here, and it may sig­ni­fy what we could call the ​“sec­ond quar­ter of play” for the SAP con­nect­ed cloud technologies.

“With the busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy plat­form, we will give cus­tomers the high­est lev­el of open­ness and flex­i­bil­i­ty to do this [and achieve this choice] — also in terms of deploy­ment mod­els,” Mueller said. ​“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.”

Is this Just Inte­gra­tion, or Orchestration?

SAP’s busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy plat­form is described as a tech­nol­o­gy that helps com­pa­nies con­nect process­es and expe­ri­ences to make deci­sions with its data man­age­ment, ana­lyt­ics, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), Inter­net of Things (IoT), and blockchain tech­nolo­gies, as well as appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment ser­vices on an open cloud plat­form. That makes it sound like an inte­gra­tion tool, but ASUG spoke to SAP Pres­i­dent of Plat­form and Tech­nolo­gies Irfan Khan, who insists that it is much more than that.

“The Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form unites SAP Cloud Plat­form, SAP HANA, ana­lyt­ics, and busi­ness ser­vices into a cohe­sive ​‘orches­tra’ of tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions. It is designed to be uni­fied and open, help­ing devel­op­ers eas­i­ly embed intel­li­gence across inte­grat­ed, mod­u­lar appli­ca­tions — whether on-premise or in the cloud, SAP or non-SAP tech­nol­o­gy,” Khan said.

So, it’s not an inte­gra­tion of one appli­ca­tion or data sur­face to anoth­er, it’s a more uni­fied and har­mo­nious orches­tra of a tech­nol­o­gy propo­si­tion. SAP’s acqui­si­tion of Qualtrics XM has pushed its agen­da to grav­i­tate toward expe­ri­ence man­age­ment. This thread is also preva­lent here. The com­pa­ny says that the com­bi­na­tion of SAP Cloud Plat­form with SAP busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy plat­form is all about con­nect­ing busi­ness process­es and expe­ri­ences so ASUG mem­bers can make con­fi­dent deci­sions with integrity.

Machine Learn­ing Pilots to Take Off

SAP is also now explain­ing how direct­ly it wants to posi­tion SAP Cloud Plat­form as a key pil­lar of the busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy plat­form. The com­pa­ny has stat­ed quite open­ly that it is ​“pilot­ing” machine learn­ing and AI tech­niques at this still com­par­a­tive­ly ear­ly stage in its devel­op­ment. So, does SAP think that many routes to machine learn­ing and AI are still unproven, too com­plex, and too tough to archi­tect into exist­ing incum­bent sys­tems, or too dif­fi­cult to code and too hard to suc­cess­ful­ly inte­grate in work­ing pro­duc­tion environments?

“When we talk to our cus­tomers, two-thirds view machine learn­ing and AI as impor­tant busi­ness ini­tia­tives, but only one-third or less are con­fi­dent in their abil­i­ty to imple­ment them,” Khan said. ​“This aris­es from the fact that infor­ma­tion man­age­ment and AI/​machine learn­ing tech­nolo­gies have worked in silos, pre­vent­ing cus­tomers from bring­ing these crit­i­cal mod­els to pro­duc­tion.” Khan explained that in his expe­ri­ence, cus­tomers have a com­plex mix of struc­tured, unstruc­tured, and object-ori­ent­ed data resid­ing in a blend of cloud and on-premise sys­tems, with access often being lim­it­ed or non­stan­dard­ized via APIs. 

“What cus­tomers are look­ing for are the real nuggets from these com­plex data sets — pre­dict­ing cus­tomer churn and mak­ing prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions. SAP recent­ly launched SAP Data Intel­li­gence that brought togeth­er the infor­ma­tion man­age­ment capa­bil­i­ties and AI in an inte­grat­ed tool to cov­er the entire process from con­nect­ing, under­stand­ing, and prepar­ing data to cre­at­ing, deploy­ing, and oper­at­ing machine learn­ing mod­els. This will enable com­pa­nies to speed up the devel­op­ment and deploy­ment of machine learning/​AI mod­els into pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ments and quick­ly start see­ing the busi­ness val­ue,” Khan said.

SAP Data Intel­li­gence is described as the first enter­prise cloud ser­vice with an end-to-end life cycle for data man­age­ment and machine learn­ing. Tech­nolo­gies such as machine learn­ing and data orches­tra­tion are on offer here to under­stand every­thing from cus­tomer churn and con­sumer behav­ior to man­u­fac­tur­ing predictions. 

Fum­bling Jum­bles or Con­nect­ed Bundles?

Look­ing at SAP Intel­li­gent Busi­ness Process Man­age­ment (SAP Intel­li­gent BPM), this bun­dle of ser­vices is designed to help 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. 

But does that make things sim­pler or not? SAP is talk­ing about ​“bun­dles of ser­vices” rather than one sin­gle plat­form play. How are we sup­posed to under­stand where the cen­tral plat­form propo­si­tion real­ly resides? SAP insists that the idea and val­ue of a plat­form is bet­ter under­stood when the plat­form is described to accel­er­ate and deliv­er bet­ter busi­ness solu­tions. For exam­ple, SAP’s Intel­li­gent Busi­ness Process Man­age­ment solu­tion con­sists of sev­er­al ser­vices, but SAP describes the busi­ness solu­tion area and tar­gets use cas­es for bet­ter busi­ness out­comes with these bun­dles of services.

“We believe that this is what busi­ness lead­ers want, e.g., inte­grat­ed ser­vices that pro­vide faster and bet­ter busi­ness out­comes, not embrac­ing the ven­dor with the most devel­op­er tools and ser­vices,” Khan said. 

Turn­ing to aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics, SAP has detailed updates to the search-to-insight exten­sion, which 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 ready to mine data points. So, is SAP aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics just a smart chat­bot then?

“SAP aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics relies on machine learn­ing tech­nol­o­gy to explore data and pro­duce intu­itive results that are easy to under­stand for mak­ing bet­ter deci­sions, faster,” Khan said. ​“SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud’s machine learn­ing tech­nol­o­gy aug­ments the ana­lyt­ics process, help­ing to go from insight to action in a frac­tion of the time. Auto­mat­ed tech­nol­o­gy enables users to avoid agen­da-dri­ven, biased deci­sion-mak­ing by reveal­ing the real sto­ry of what dri­ves your busi­ness. The lat­est capa­bil­i­ties sur­round­ing aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics offer live chat with all data types and appli­ca­tions across an enter­prise for much smarter insights.”

SAP HANA, Still a North Star?

So, where did SAP HANA fea­ture in any of these prod­uct updates? Has it final­ly dawned on SAP that a high­er-lev­el cloud-cen­tric plat­form play is more impor­tant than try­ing to posi­tion a high-per­form­ing data solu­tion as the company’s lead­ing sell­ing point? 

“SAP HANA is men­tioned last [in recent news updates] because it under­pins every­thing we are doing at SAP, includ­ing the busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy plat­form,” Khan said. ​“From SAP S/4HANA to SAP C/4HANA to busi­ness ser­vices to cloud data man­age­ment, HANA is crit­i­cal to SAP’s strat­e­gy. The core claims of SAP HANA still stand true — its abil­i­ty to process both ana­lyt­i­cal and trans­ac­tion­al work­loads, remov­ing aggre­gates and sec­ondary data struc­tures, and har­ness­ing the per­for­mance of in-mem­o­ry computing.”

As we see an explo­sion in the amount of data pro­duced, what is aris­ing is the growth of dig­i­tal­iza­tion and the move to the cloud. What SAP says it is tak­ing the ​“bril­liance” of HANA and tran­si­tion­ing it into this new con­text. SAP HANA is still very much the guid­ing North Star for the SAP appli­ca­tion and plat­form future.

Reg­is­ter for the ASUG Expe­ri­ence for Enter­prise Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment (EIM) Oct. 28 – 30 in Min­neapo­lis to learn from peers how to man­age your data to meet busi­ness goals. 

Pho­to: SAP