Pho­to Cred­it: SAP

As expect­ed, SAP Chair­man Has­so Plat­tner kicked off day two of SAP­PHIRE NOW and the ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence by expand­ing on the two major themes intro­duced by SAP CEO Bill McDer­mott on day one: SAP C/4HANA and the intel­li­gent enter­prise. But he also intro­duced a new idea: The pos­si­ble end of the exten­sive cus­tomiza­tions so com­mon in on-premise imple­men­ta­tions as com­pa­nies migrate to the SAP Cloud Plat­form, which received a big push through­out the day.

The End of Customization?

Com­pa­nies have become accus­tomed to cus­tomiz­ing their SAP sys­tems as a cost of doing busi­ness. Yet Plat­tner said, ​“We also have to reduce main­te­nance. We have these mod­i­fi­ca­tions — and we have to get rid of them.”

One goal of putting SAP into the cloud is to strip away all the mod­i­fi­ca­tions, as Plat­tner promised that the new func­tions avail­able in the soft­ware will cov­er some of the areas that enter­pris­es have devel­oped as exten­sions. ​“We don’t want to change (the source code) in the cloud in the future. We don’t even allow it,” he said.

Instead, SAP announced that it embed­ded SAP Ana­lyt­ics cloud capa­bil­i­ties direct­ly into SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It allows cus­tomers to access more than 150 cloud data sources. It also uses machine learn­ing and nat­ur­al lan­guage query tech­nol­o­gy and includes pre­built con­tent and busi­ness log­ic for more than 20 SAP prod­ucts such as SAP SuccessFactors.

Run­ning on Mul­ti­ple Clouds

Com­pa­nies now have more options when choos­ing a cloud ser­vices provider for an SAP imple­men­ta­tion. SAP announced that SAP Cloud Plat­form is now avail­able on Google Cloud Plat­form and Microsoft Azure, join­ing Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) as choic­es for deploy­ment. SAP also announced its inten­tion to release SAP Cloud Plat­form, pri­vate edi­tion, on IBM Cloud as a pri­vate cloud deploy­ment. This option is geared toward heav­i­ly reg­u­lat­ed indus­tries like bank­ing, health care, and trans­porta­tion, or any enter­prise man­ag­ing high­ly sen­si­tive data.

Using the SAP Cloud Plat­form should reduce cycle times and allow com­pa­nies to deliv­er a bet­ter cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, allow­ing them to adapt to chang­ing mar­ket con­di­tions and con­sumer demand, accord­ing to Bjorn Goerke, CTO of SAP. SAP Cloud Plat­form is ​“where cool meets the enter­prise,” he said.

Keep­ing with the choic­es theme, SAP also announced the release of the SAP Cloud Plat­form soft­ware devel­op­ment kit (SDK) for Android, join­ing the exist­ing SDK for iOS. This com­pletes SAP’s mobile offer­ings to pro­vide a native cloud expe­ri­ence on mobile devices, accord­ing to Goerke.

The Intel­li­gent Enter­prise May Not Be Ready for Prime Time

“Even toast­ers will become intel­li­gent,” Plat­tner said. The intel­li­gent enter­prise is more than a mar­ket­ing buzz­word and more than ERP. SAP has sur­round­ed the cen­ter­piece of the intel­li­gent enter­prise, SAP Cloud Plat­form, with appli­ca­tions. While SAP can’t tech­ni­cal­ly use ​“intel­li­gent enter­prise” as an SAP brand, it is using it to describe a col­lec­tion of prod­ucts — for which Plat­tner added, ​“I don’t think I’d promise too much — if you buy all of them, you will get a discount.”

Expand­ing on the intel­li­gent enter­prise theme, SAP announced sev­er­al SAP Leonar­do enhance­ments, includ­ing that SAP Leonar­do machine learn­ing capa­bil­i­ties now come stan­dard in SAP appli­ca­tions. SAP Leonar­do Machine Learn­ing Foun­da­tion now has five new ser­vices, includ­ing object detec­tion, text recog­ni­tion in images, and text clas­si­fi­ca­tion, which ana­lyzes and auto­mat­i­cal­ly cat­e­go­rizes text doc­u­ments. SAP also released SAP Leonar­do-based ​“inno­va­tion kits” for spe­cif­ic indus­tries, includ­ing retail, life sci­ences, man­u­fac­tur­ing, and automotive. 

Human Hands on the Wheel

Dur­ing the keynote, Franck Cohen, pres­i­dent, SAP Dig­i­tal Core & Indus­try Solu­tions, attempt­ed to demon­strate voice queries into an ERP sys­tem. Con­nec­tiv­i­ty issues pre­vent­ed the speech con­ver­sa­tion demo from com­plet­ing. The idea is to cre­ate a hands-free ERP sys­tem where users con­verse with the sys­tem, Cohen said.

No mat­ter what, human touch will be required in the intel­li­gent enter­prise, said Markus Noga, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent, SAP Machine Learn­ing. ​“We still have to keep our hands on the wheel for one-offs and crit­i­cal deci­sions,” he said.

Blockchain in the Sup­ply Chain

SAP Cloud Plat­form Blockchain, a blockchain as a ser­vice offer­ing, was also announced. This lets com­pa­nies use blockchain tech­nolo­gies like Hyper­ledger Fab­ric and Mul­ti­Chain. Sausage mak­er John­sonville LLC already uses blockchain to trace prod­ucts through­out its sup­ply chain.

Ques­tion­ing SAP’s Own Integration

While Plat­tner expound­ed on the intel­li­gent enter­prise and SAP C/4HANA announce­ments, he also men­tioned inte­gra­tion. SAP has realigned its own inter­nal struc­ture to fos­ter inte­gra­tion between SAP prod­ucts. But, as Plat­tner him­self admit­ted, ​“our inte­gra­tion between sys­tems is not per­fect.” In an exec­u­tive Q&A brief­ing, he men­tioned that SAP was at the top of the inte­gra­tion game, when SAP ECC was the lat­est product. 

Quotes of the Day

“That’s where the cool s— hap­pens.” – Bjorn Goerke, SAP CTO, on SAP Cloud Platform

“Our inte­gra­tion between sys­tems is still not per­fect.” – Has­so Plat­tner, Chair­man, SAP

Find out what hap­pened on day one and day three in our 2018 SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence cov­er­age. Or read a recap of Dr. Has­so’s keynote.