SAP Sapphire 2024 Wrap-Up

The biggest event in the SAP calendar, SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, wrapped up last week in Orlando. The June 3rd-5th event attracts business and technology folks from around the globe and is THE place to be if you're in the SAP ecosystem. 2024's event was the biggest since pre-pandemic, with 14,000+ attendees. SAP, its customers, and its partners converge to Sapphire to share stories, ideas, and exciting innovations.

A majority of these innovations centered around the hottest two letters in the alphabet these days.... AI. Artificial Intelligence was not just a central theme of Sapphire, but seemed to be uttered every other sentence.

Innovation with SAP's AI

SAP's CEO Christian Klein hammered this point home in his keynote address, titled "Bringing Out The Best In Your Business". It centered around SAP's own AI assistant technology, Joule. Joule appears poised to eventually become the natural way users interact with SAP on the front end and User Experience side. Imagine accessing an SAP screen today via Fiori. Joule will become a natural part of the transaction screen, commandeering the right 1/4 of the screen as a chat window in which users can type natural language questions, queries, etc., and Joule will be able to return answers, suggestions, data, etc. This might include answers to business questions such as "Show me my top 10 items on backorder" or even more technical responses to "How do I configure a House Bank" or "Write me an ABAP user exist to......"

Klein goes on to say that Joule Joule currently has 50 AI use cases, that by the end of 2024 there will be 100 available and is to be delivered out of the box to cloud customers by the end of 2024. Klein also predicts that eventually

80% of the most used tasks will be managed via Joule and the 300 million end users of SAP products will be 20% more productive.

SAP is all in on AI. Klein touched on one important topic: the responsible use of AI, announcing that SAP is among the first tech companies to adhere to UNESCO’s AI principles.

…you can see that we are not developing AI just for the sake of AI. Our vision at SAP is to leverage our holistic portfolio: to deliver agility at scale, meaning increasing the productivity of every user and business process, to achieve more across the value chain by connecting the material, the financial, and the logistic workflows across the industries, via our business network, and to enable you to run a sustainable business by making ESG transparent, and make holistic decisions to drive sustainable, as well as comfortable growth. - Klein

SAP's AI Partnerships

The keynote was heavy on SAP partnerships. First, let's touch on SAP's expansion of their Gen AI Hub, allowing customers and partners to develop their own AI use cases using a broad set of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, Google Gemini, and their own proprietary models. The value of the hub is that for those inclined, it offers organizations the ability to build their own AI models and tools with the ability to access and integrate into SAP’s data and identity layers via the Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). This will be significant to the SAP Partner ecosystem, allowing partners to build their own AI offerings, which they can sell to customers. On the customer side, this is probably less relevant unless your organization is deeply investing in an internal AI team and capabilities to build and train your own Artificial Intelligence.

Other partnerships centered around large and long-time SAP partners like Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia, etc.

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Microsoft

SAP announced the integration of Joule with Microsoft 365 Copilot, creating two-way integration to enhance user experience and productivity.

This two-way integration is the only one in the industry so deep, that no matter which Copilot you use, it’s one experience - Klein

It was touted that a user in Copilot for Microsoft 365 will eventually be able to leverage SAP Joule to access information stored in different SAP solutions—for example, S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, or SAP Concur. Similarly, someone using SAP Joule in an SAP application will be able to use Copilot for Microsoft 365 capabilities without context switching. Combine this with an SAP ecosystem running in Azure, and you have a powerful integrated cloud solution with access to data everywhere.

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Amazon Web Services

Christian Klein brought out AWS CEO Matt Garman to discuss the expanding partnership between SAP and AWS. This expansion included AWS helping to power SAP’s new AI initiatives and the integration of Amazon Bedrock, “a fully managed service that makes it super easy for you to go build generative AI applications”, into SAP’s generative AI Hub.

SAP also announced that BTP, HANA Cloud, and SAP Datasphere will be available to run on AWS Graviton processors. Garman highlighted the reduced power consumption and cost savings compared to x86 processors. No doubt a step in the right direction, but I thought it missed the mark to SAP customers. If SAP's position is RISE with SAP and to take the customer's infrastructure worry out of their solutions, why should a lower cost, more efficient processor matter to customers? The processor is so far removed from the customer that unless SAP is offering discounts or other incentives customers shouldn't care. They're paying for a cloud solution and expect it to run optimally and efficiently.

What was more interesting was that AWS launched a BTP edition of AWS SAP SDK, which will greatly help SAP AWS customers use more of the native AWS tools and services with BTP.

allows all of you developers out there to much more easily build and combine BTP capabilities with all your various other AWS services and AWS environments that you’re building on. - Garman

Nvidia

At one point in the keynote Christian Klein said "we have to talk about Nvidia." then introduced Nvidia's President and CEO Jensen Huang. Klein made it a point to say that Nvidia is a RISE customer, then Jensen talked about his Blackwell product and its ties into SAP by calling the product very complicated to manufacture with lots of parts and how critical the supply chain is, joking that the fate of the entire world is on SAP's shoulders. Why? Why did this even need to be a part of the keynote? With its technical difficulties and somewhat forced interaction and storytelling, I can only surmise SAP thought: how can we incorporate the hottest company in the world right now? There really wasn't any "partnership" value here.

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Apple

SAP also announced that Apple's Vision Pro will have the SAP Start app and SAP Analytics Cloud available, with the intention of Joule coming in late 2024. Joule will also be available on Apple products by the end of 2024. So you can rejoice with all you Mac, iPad, iWatch, and iPhone users trying to use SAP on your Apple devices.

Rise with SAP Developments

Let's take a moment to shift gears from partnerships into SAP cloud offerings, specifically RISE with SAP. There were a few very notable announcements to help SAP customer's adoption of RISE

In my opinion, the most significant change is that SAP will assign an Enterprise Architect to every customer to help guide their individual transformation journey.

In the migration phase, the Enterprise Architect will ensure that we are really moving to our north-star architecture, that we are using the Business Technology Platform as standard integration platform. - Klein

He also highlighted that Rise customers would have access to LeanIX, Signavio, and their Cloud Application Lifecycle Management tools included in a customer's RISE solution. Although details are still hazy about to what extent and for how long these tools will be available to customers.

Grow With SAP Premium

Julia White, SAP's Chief Marketing & Solution Officer, also unveiled Grow with SAP, Premium. This will be the Grow with SAP solution with the addition of SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Concur expense management at no additional charge, aimed at midsize companies and subsidiaries of larger organizations.

White went on to drive home BTP, and it's a necessity when adopting either Grow or RISE. BTP should become the de-facto way to customize, extend, and integrate SAP. This makes sense given the relatively constrained, out-of-the-box nature of Grow.

If you’re using Rise, or with Grow, the BTP is the best way to extend these solutions. The BTP provides a full range of capabilities to extend, integrate, and customize your cloud ERP in a native way. And, importantly, get the most out of your data with SAP Datasphere and HANA Cloud. - White

Playing off of these keynote topics, Sapphire contains many sessions and discussions around AI, BTP, and RISE. Most of the AI discussion was around starting to consider how you might be able to leverage Joule and other SAP AI in the future. This is because most of the features are not yet available to the average SAP customer.

The more here-and-now discussion focused on how other SAP customers are using BTP in new and innovative ways. There were lots of good user-case stories of building and integrating into SAP via BTP.

There was also a focus on RISE, but interestingly enough, the messaging was markedly different from years past. At previous Sapphires, there was more of a scare tactic approach of if you don't move to the cloud, you'll miss out on innovation, you'll miss out on the ability to use AI, you run the risk of losing out on SAP support in 2027, etc. This year, these themes were downplayed. The messaging was a more subtle approach. SAP focused on Rise with SAP customer success stories, highlighting the speed and ease at which customers were able to make the transition. There was also more agnostic talk about upgrading/innovating with S/4HANA, not specifically Rise or Grow. So we heard a mixed bag of stories from customers who moved to Rise and who moved to another flavor of S/4HANA, i.e. their own private cloud, on Azure, AWS, or even on-prem.

This was a smart move by SAP; to soften their previously stifling push to adopt RISE. Customers oftentimes felt like a cornered animal backed into a situation, and a visual reaction of flight or fight took hold. SAP is now doing a better job of supporting and working with customers collaboratively on an S/4 journey.

In Closing

Sapphire 2024 was the SAP event of the year, and I highly suggest attending. There is no other time or place where 14,000+ SAP individuals gather to connect and collaborate. The ideas shared and the insight gained are so valuable that everyone brings back a new vigor to their organization. SAP's theme, "Bringing Out The Best In Your Business," stands true. We all walk away with the ability to now bring out the best in our business.