The SAP TechEd 2023 Executive Keynote in Bangalore took place on the November 2, hosted by Juergen Mueller, Chief Technology Officer and Member of the Executive Board of SAP.
Other contributors included Michael Ameling, SVP, Head of Intelligent Enterprise and BTP Foundation, Julia White, Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer, Member of the Executive Board, and Walter Sun, SVP and Global Head of Artificial Intelligence, SAP
The Executive Keynote presentation highlighted SAP’s latest innovations in AI and generative AI capabilities across its product portfolio, with product demonstrations, and stories from SAP partners and customers.
SAP Build Code – A new pro-code offering for developers using Java and JavaScript on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). It provides AI-powered productivity tools and integrates with SAP’s generative AI assistant Joule.
SAP Integration Suite Edge Integration Cell – New runtime now generally available, providing more flexibility for integration and API management in distributed environments.
SAP Datasphere – Enhancements announced to further improve business data management, including Semantic Onboarding for self-service data sharing.
SAP HANA Cloud Vector Engine – Provides groundbreaking capabilities to manage unstructured data for generative AI applications, available in Q1 2024.
SAP Analytics Cloud – Performance improvements of up to 60% with the new Lightweight Viewer., and expanded natural language capabilities through integration with Joule.
SAP Business AI – The SAP Generative AI hub was announced, which provides instant access to major AI models. This will also facilitate grounding to enterprise data.
GenAI embedded into SAP BTP – Previews were shown for integrating generative AI into developer, admin and integration workflows in SAP BTP.
SAP BTP Developer’s Guide – New best practices and reference architectures for SAP BTP released.
SAP announced its new pro-code offering SAP Build Code: AI-powered productivity tools for developers optimized for Java and JavaScript development. Combining the low-code and pro-code offering, SAP Build Code enhances the collaboration between professional and citizen developers.
SAP Build Code begins a new era of simplified and optimized development for SAP solutions. This game-changing offering provides developers with a streamlined coding environment powered by generative AI, facilitating rapid creation of business applications.
The offering provides developers a with simplified experience and a unified lobby as the starting point for both SAP Build and SAP Build Code. Fusion development also gets a boost, blending programming languages and low-code within projects. Enhanced collaboration features unite developers, business users, and IT governance through composable apps and reusable artifacts and resources across SAP Build tools.
At its core is Joule Copilot, which enables AI-generated code including logic, data models, services, and sample data straight from natural language prompts. This allows developers to build full-stack, back-end, and mobile apps faster through guided experiences and pre-built templates.
SAP Build Code follows the CAP model which is used for JAVA and JavaScript based applications on SAP BTP.
Designed for SAP-focused development, SAP Build Code comes pre-loaded with APIs and business services for seamless integration with SAP and third-party systems. Building on SAP Business Technology Platform, it inherits robust security and productivity capabilities to easily extend solutions like SAP S/4HANA.
Overall, SAP Build Code accelerates development, simplifies integration, and fosters innovation: a game-changer for SAP developers worldwide.
The new Edge Integration Cell runtime is now generally available for SAP integration Suite. Now customers with heterogenous and distributed environments have better flexibility and control over integrations and APIs.
Edge Integration Cell is set to revolutionize SAP integration by enabling hybrid deployments. This on-premise runtime option for SAP Integration Suite, to be released later this year, is parking interest across the SAP integration industry.
With Edge Integration Cell, integration flows designed in the cloud can be deployed on-premise rather than to the cloud tenant runtime. This hybrid model brings integration closer to local systems while leveraging cloud design. Similar to SAP Process Orchestration, Edge Integration Cell can be fully installed and operated within your own network.
By bridging cloud and on-premise, Edge Integration Cell provides flexibility in managing integrations. Companies can optimize performance, compliance, and data sovereignty by keeping integrations local. At the same time, they benefit from cloud-based design and updates.
This is big news for SAP customers who want to retain on-premise elements in their SAP landscapes, and those system integrators who will be needed to provide that capability.
SAP announced additional features in SAP Datasphere to help customers continue streamlining their business data fabric and improve interoperability.
Organizations often face challenges in connecting and making sense of critical business data spread across disparate systems. The traditional approach of IT extracting, transforming, and reloading data is cumbersome, resource-intensive, and strips away contextual semantics that impart meaning. This diluted data loses value for driving insights.
SAP Datasphere breaks this paradigm by preserving data semantics rather than ripping away the contextual richness surrounding data, SAP Datasphere maintains these critical semantics as data is onboarded. This accelerates the delivery of business-ready data products that retain the full meaning and value companies need to power data-driven decisions.
With SAP Datasphere, the intensive IT effort to rebuild lost data context is a thing of the past. Data semantics stay intact, unlocking deeper insights and enabling a semantic layer that endures across future data projects. SAP Datasphere’s semantic onboarding keeps data meaningful.
In Q4, 2023 SAP Datasphere Semantic Onboarding will be generally available. This is a fresh new approach to building data products and enabling other domains to self-serve and securely distribute them.
SAP HANA Cloud’s multi-model capabilities will be expanded by vector database capabilities to fully leverage the power of generative AI. Vector capabilities will enable customers to manage unstructured data, such as text, images, and audio as vector embeddings.
This new capability provides the long-term memory and context that generative AI models need to understand the complexities of businesses as they evolve over time, and to generate accurate and relevant responses.
SAP HANA Cloud’s new vector capabilities will not only simplify interactions with large language models, but also empower developers to implement generative AI securely within their intelligent data applications.
By ingesting enterprise data directly into the vector database, the language models gain a deeper understanding of business environments. Now conversations can reference real-time company data like financial positions, supply constraints or payroll data when providing recommendations or insights.
Instead of operating in a vacuum, the models can factor an organization’s unique attributes and circumstances into responses. The SAP HANA Vector Engine unlocks more tailored, relevant AI conversations grounded in business realities.
With enterprise data powering its language models, SAP is bringing context-aware conversational AI to organizations looking to transform interactions and decisions.
This innovation will be available in Q1 of 2024.
SAP Analytics Cloud has become faster than ever before. Using Lightweight Viewer performance is up to 60% faster compared to the classical SAC stack.
Retrieving insights from business data is now quicker with a new feature called Just Ask. With natural language interaction, it’s also easier to interact with the system to get the insights you need.
Just Ask is integrated with SAP Analytics Cloud and complements SAP’s generative AI copilot, Joule. Just Ask will be available to most of the existing SAP Analytics Cloud enterprise customers starting in Q1.
SAP announced the release of generative AI hub in SAP AI Core, planned for general availability by December 2023. SAP Generative AI Hub provides developers instant access to a broad range of large language models, including Azure OpenAI and Falcon-40b. More models, including Meta’s Llama2 and Aleph Alpha, are expected to be added early next year.
With generative AI hub, you can also leverage grounding capabilities based on enterprise data via SAP HANA Cloud Vector capabilities.
Other plans include additional capabilities such as prompt management with templates, libraries, the ability to fine-tune support for scenarios requiring deeper domain-specific context and building proprietary SAP tabular transformer-based models.
SAP showcased future-looking preview scenarios in which generative AI is infused into SAP BTP to increase the productivity of SAP BTP application developers, administrators, and integration developers.
SAP’s generative AI assistant Joule will be embedded in SAP BTP Cockpit, and ABAP Cloud programming as well as SAP Build Process Automation will have options for AI assistance
SAP also announced the creation of the AI Foundation: a ‘one-stop-shop’ for developers looking to increase impact and efficiency. AI Foundation is intended to accelerate development of generative AI extensions and applications on SAP BTP.
Another resource announced during the keynote was the SAP BTP Developer’s Guide. It serves as an invaluable roadmap for building business applications on SAP Business Technology Platform.
Leveraging proven methodologies and technologies, the guide lays out best practices for developing SAP apps and extensions, provisioning automated SAP BTP infrastructure, and integrating systems.
To maximize productivity, the guide recommends ABAP Cloud and SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) as optimal architectures. With seamless connections across SAP BTP services, these approaches enable efficient delivery of solutions purpose-built for SAP BTP.
Drawing from real-world expertise, the SAP BTP Developer’s Guide distills the complexities of application development into an actionable framework. Developers gain a streamlined process for going from ideas to production on SAP BTP, complete with integration strategies and infrastructure automation. For those embarking on the SAP BTP journey, this guide provides the ideal blueprint.
SAP TechEd 2023 runs from November 2-3, but it is not too late for developers and other SAP professionals to benefit from the wealth of valuable on-demand resources and content from SAP TechEd 2023 by registering for access. Those that register will also get a very valuable discount code for SAP Certifications fees.
The keynotes, live and on-demand sessions at SAP TechEd 2023 serve as a valuable resource for those looking to see how AI will optimize their ability to implement and develop SAP systems, applications, and extensions.
SAP is developing AI for use in industry and commerce, but also is making huge steps in making development more accessible with SAP Build, as well as more productive for those specialists working with Java, Javascript and ABAP with SAP Build Code.
It is clear that the pace of technological change is accelerating due to AI, but as these new features and products showcased at SAP TechEd 2023 demonstrate, AI can also be used to accelerate human adaptation to those new working practices and development, to help make the most of the AI-powered revolution in SAP.
If you are an SAP Developer, an SAP Functional, or Technical consultant, our dedicated and experienced recruitment team can match you with your ideal employer and help negotiate a compensation package that reflects your extremely valuable skills, so join our exclusive community at IgniteSAP
