Generative AI hub in SAP AI Core integrates with foundation models in Amazon Bedrock to deliver generative AI-driven insights and streamline manual processes for enterprise customers

SEATTLE and WALLDORF — Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced an expanded, strategic collaboration to transform modern cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) experiences and help enterprises drive new capabilities and efficiencies with generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Together, AWS and SAP are striving to make it easier for customers to adopt the RISE with SAP solution on AWS, to improve the performance and efficiency of SAP workloads running in the cloud and to embed generative AI into an enterprise’s entire portfolio of business-critical applications.

“AWS was the first cloud provider certified to support the SAP portfolio and today, thousands of enterprise companies run SAP solutions on AWS to get the most out of their mission-critical applications,” said Matt Garman incoming CEO at AWS. “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.”

“Partnerships like this collaboration with AWS are critical as we embed generative AI solutions across our ERP applications so that customers can drive innovation at an accelerated pace,” said Christian Klein, Chief Executive Officer of SAP SE. “In addition to delivering modern cloud ERP to our joint customers, we are excited to support Amazon on their own transformation journey as they adopt RISE with SAP for pioneering areas such as Project Kuiper, Amazon’s satellite initiative intended to increase global broadband access.”

Generative AI Models from Amazon Bedrock Available on the Generative AI Hub in SAP AI Core

The generative AI hub in SAP AI Core infrastructure provides customers with secure access to a broad range of large language models (LLMs) that can easily be integrated into SAP business applications. With the integration of generative AI models from Amazon Bedrock such as the Anthropic Claude 3 model family and Amazon Titan, SAP customers will be able to access high-performing LLMs and other foundation models (FMs) to build applications customized with their own data. Tens of thousands of customers use Amazon Bedrock to easily, quickly and securely build and scale generative AI applications using FMs from leading AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI and Amazon.

With this integration, SAP customers may accelerate the adoption of generative AI and modernize key business processes built on SAP solutions. These innovations can be used in embedded use cases within RISE with SAP and the intelligent scenario lifecycle management functionality as an integration component or side-by-side directly on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). SAP and AWS plan to expand the use of Bedrock capabilities in the generative AI hub to further enable embedded AI functionality within SAP’s portfolio of cloud solutions and applications. This includes additional use cases across finance and product lifecycle management.

SAP to Use AWS Chips to Train and Deploy Future SAP Business AI Offerings

SAP’s use of AWS Graviton3 chips to support SAP HANA Cloud helps to deliver performance gains, cost savings and energy efficiency to SAP. By using Graviton3-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, SAP has realized up to 30% better compute for analytical workloads and an estimated 45% reduction in carbon footprint for SAP HANA Cloud. Now SAP and AWS are collaborating on the next generation of Graviton4 for SAP HANA Cloud and additional SAP applications to continue to improve performance and efficiency. Based on the success of running SAP HANA Cloud on AWS Graviton, SAP plans to use AWS Graviton to support SAP solutions and applications such as SAP BTP, SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud and the SAP Cloud ALM solution.

SAP plans to use AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia chips, purpose built for AI and machine learning (ML) workloads, for training and deploying future SAP Business AI offerings. Using Trainium and Inferentia2-based instances in a proof of concept, SAP engineers trained and fine-tuned generative AI LLMs in two days versus 23 days with comparable Amazon EC2 instances. By leveraging Trainium’s specialized architecture designed for efficient ML model training, SAP can accelerate the development process while maintaining high levels of accuracy and reliability.

Increased Performance for RISE with SAP on AWS

Thousands of customers have selected RISE with SAP on AWS to run their largest, most complex, global SAP solution implementations. Now generally available, the next-generation Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances offer up to 32TiB of memory in a single instance and provide customers the memory and flexibility they need to support expanding SAP HANA database requirements. Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances are the first DDR5 memory-based 8-socket offering by a leading cloud provider to improve the performance of memory-intensive applications such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud as part of RISE with SAP.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper Selects RISE with SAP

Amazon companies, including Twitch, Zappos.com and Zoox Inc., already use SAP software on AWS to support their operations. And now Project Kuiper—Amazon’s satellite broadband network—is deploying RISE with SAP to support its complex supply chain and manufacturing operations and get the best performance and most value out of its mission-critical SAP software. Running SAP solutions on AWS allows Kuiper to take advantage of the latest SAP capabilities embedded in RISE with SAP to help drive impactful transformation, accelerating company decisions and enhancing overall performance and productivity.

Hundreds of millions of people lack adequate internet access and Project Kuiper’s goal is to help close the digital divide by delivering fast, affordable broadband to a wide variety of customers operating in places without reliable internet connections. Delivering on that vision requires Kuiper to build satellites at an unprecedented rate. RISE with SAP allows the Project Kuiper team to leverage the most reliable and scalable infrastructure to run a modern, cloud ERP as a managed service, so they can focus on innovation instead of IT management.

To learn more about the SAP and AWS partnership, tune in to the SAP Sapphire conference, June 3-5, in Orlando.

Visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP at @SAPNews.

About Amazon Web Services

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Alexandra Steiger will join SAP as new global head of Investor Relations on July 1, 2024, reporting to Dominik Asam, member of the Executive Board and CFO of SAP SE.

With over a decade of experience in the finance industry, Steiger has held roles at renowned institutions such as Goldman Sachs and UBS. She currently serves as executive director within Global Investment Research at Goldman Sachs, focusing on the U.S. Internet sector, including companies such as Alphabet, Meta and Amazon.

“I am very happy Alexandra is joining SAP,” said Asam. “We will benefit from her leadership and the wealth of expertise she brings from her previous responsibilities. In her new role, she can build on the strong foundation laid by Anthony Coletta and the entire Investor Relations team.”

Prior to her assignment at Goldman Sachs, Steiger was an executive director within UBS Equity Research, covering select U.S. Internet and Interactive Entertainment companies. She received a bachelor’s degree in International Business Administration from the University of Maastricht and a master’s degree in International Management CEMS from the Erasmus University Rotterdam and University of St. Gallen.

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Top image courtesy of SAP employee Laurentia-Iulia Pavel

This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ.  Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of SAP’s 2023 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
© 2024 SAP SE. All rights reserved.
SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and other countries. Please see https://www.sap.com/copyright for additional trademark information and notices.

Talk to any high-tech industry leader who’s launched an as-a-service offering, and they’ll tell you that everything as a service (XaaS) is unlike any other business model transformation. Instead of a one-and-done sales transaction, customers are signing up for a long-term relationship that bundles services with the company’s hardware or software products. XaaS often broadens the collaborative bonds with partners that are involved in service delivery as well. At the outset, companies need to think big but start small.

“Moving to an as-a-service model dramatically changes how an organization does business and keeps customers satisfied, starting with product design and pricing through synchronized order fulfillment, revenue recognition and sharing, invoicing, and contract management,” said Mirjam Wittmann, director of Product Marketing, High Technology at SAP. “We’re seeing our customers begin with a targeted pilot in one line of business, followed by refinements and expansion to monetize XaaS packages for greatest competitive advantage.”

XaaS-Driven Growth at Lenovo: Go Bigger Than Back Office

Everything-as-a-service business models are essential to Lenovo’s growth plans. Long recognized for laptops, phones, tablets, data center servers, and business solutions, the company’s service-led transformation has been a catalyst for significant expansion in its non-PC business, accounting for over 42% of the company’s revenue.

“We’re in a phase of rapid acceleration, focusing our efforts on the expansion and refinement of our XaaS capabilities and business infrastructure,” said Arthur Hu, senior vice president and chief information officer at Lenovo and chief technology and delivery officer at Lenovo’s Solutions and Services Group. “This journey involves a multifaceted approach, combining agile development, strategic partnerships, and continuous optimization to ensure that our XaaS offerings meet the evolving needs of our clients.”

Hu said that SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management provides Lenovo with the flexibility to monetize services through pay-as-you-go, subscription, consumption-based, outcome-based, and other models. For example, the company can structure pay-as-you-go packages priced by the customer’s power consumption, storage of gigabytes, utilization, and number of nodes in an installation.

“Redefine your product hierarchies to fit the as-a-service world. Update financial accounting for managed services, such as revenue recognition and costing. Provide the sales team with a clear understanding of the offerings so they can articulate the value to customers,” Hu said. “Make sure that every impacted system has the integrated data for accurate and timely fulfillment and entitlement that delivers the optimal customer experience and desired outcomes.”

Personalized XaaS Offerings Generate Revenue at Autodesk

Autodesk offers customers both subscription- and usage-based models for nearly all products across 50 countries. As a global leader in the design and software industry for media, construction, and engineering, Autodesk is using XaaS to future-proof the company.

“As-a-service provides us with a scalable, nimble foundation that drives better outcomes for customers and generates a steady stream of revenue for the company. We can quickly offer customers personalized products and pricing combinations for faster go-to-market,” said Sudhir Misal, senior director of Engineering at Autodesk. “SAP solutions are the backbone of our as-a-service business model, helping us cost-efficiently manage orders, converged invoicing, contract accounting, and the financial supply chain. For example, we’ve reduced quarterly financial closing times by over 80%.”

Misal agreed that a successful XaaS strategy requires a mindset shift.

“You need to partner closely with your system provider, in our case it was SAP, to understand the business context behind the offering. We focused on standardizing as much as possible,” Misal said. “Change management was a priority as we went through this journey that included all stakeholders. By talking with peer companies to hear their learnings, we avoided repeating mistakes that others have made.”

Generative AI Promises Dynamic Innovation

No discussion of high-tech innovation would be complete without addressing the significance of generative AI. Misal said that Autodesk was exploring how AI can help companies quickly test and adopt value-added XaaS offerings.

“Generative AI can analyze data to help organizations see how customers are behaving depending on the services they’re using,” said Wittmann. “Data from generative AI can help companies cross sell and upsell personalized services that meet individual customer preferences, increasing customer loyalty. With faster market demand insights, companies can dynamically adjust XaaS bundles and iterate fresh ideas to take advantage of emerging opportunities before the competition.”

Learn more about becoming a scalable subscription business with SAP’s unified quote-to-cash solutions for recurring revenue.