SAP AI pact with AWS offers customers more gen AI options

SAP is expanding its AI ecosystem with a partnership with AWS.

Such AI partnerships are important for SAP, said Chief Technology Officer Jürgen Müller, pointing to other cooperations, for example with IBM, the chip manufacturer Nvidia and various universities.

In addition, SAP is also working closely with Microsoft and Google on AI. The cloud hyperscalers AWS, Google and Microsoft are also important platform partners to operate SAP’s cloud applications.

AWS and SAP unleash generative AI on core business data

“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, who will soon take over as CEO of 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,” he said in a statement.

As part of the partnership with AWS, SAP users will be able to use AI services from the cloud hyperscaler’s Bedrock family, as well as LLMs (large language models) of the Titan series.

For this, the SAP systems do not necessarily have to run in the AWS cloud, SAP’s Müller explained. Rather, customers can access a wide variety of AI functions and models via the generative AI Hub integrated into SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP), including in the AWS cloud.

With this integration, SAP customers could accelerate the introduction of generative AI and modernize important business processes based on SAP solutions, according to a statement from the German software company. SAP and AWS are also apparently planning to make greater use of the Bedrock functions in the generative AI Hub to enable further embedded AI functions within SAP’s portfolio of cloud solutions and applications, for example in finance and product lifecycle management.

SAP optimizes HANA Cloud for AWS chips

SAP also announced that it intends to optimize its own HANA Cloud for use with AWS Graviton3 chips. With corresponding Graviton3-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, the company has already been able to achieve up to 30 percent better computing performance for analytical workloads and an estimated reduction in the CO2 footprint of 45 percent.

In the future, SAP and AWS plan to work together on the next generation of Graviton4 for SAP HANA Cloud and other SAP applications to make them more powerful and efficient. SAP also plans to use AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia chips, designed specifically for AI and machine learning (ML) workloads, to train and deploy future SAP business AI offerings.