AWS & SAP expand collaboration to enhance AI-driven ERP

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAP have announced an expanded strategic collaboration aimed at transforming modern cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) experiences using generative artificial intelligence (AI).

This partnership seeks to help enterprises drive new capabilities and efficiencies within their operations.

The collaboration is set to make it simpler for customers to adopt the RISE with SAP solution on AWS, enhance the performance and efficiency of SAP workloads in the cloud, and incorporate generative AI into a wide range of business-critical applications. Matt Garman, the incoming CEO of AWS, highlighted that AWS was the first cloud provider certified to support the SAP portfolio. “Today, thousands of enterprise companies run SAP solutions on AWS to get the most out of their mission-critical applications. 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,” stated Garman.

SAP's CEO, Christian Klein, echoed the importance of the collaboration. He remarked, “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. 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.”

The partnership integrates generative AI models from Amazon Bedrock into the SAP AI Core infrastructure, providing customers with secure access to a diverse range of large language models (LLMs). These can be seamlessly integrated into SAP business applications to build customised applications with their own data. Currently, tens of thousands of customers use Amazon Bedrock to build and scale generative AI applications, leveraging foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, and Stability AI.

This integration allows SAP customers to accelerate the adoption of generative AI, modernising key business processes built on SAP solutions. SAP and AWS plan to further expand the capabilities within SAP's cloud portfolio, including additional use cases across finance and product lifecycle management.

SAP is also set to use AWS Graviton3 chips to power SAP HANA Cloud, which will result in performance gains, cost savings, and enhanced energy efficiency. Leveraging Graviton3-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, SAP has reported a 30% improvement in computing for analytical workloads and an estimated 45% reduction in carbon footprint for SAP HANA Cloud. Plans are underway to incorporate the next generation of Graviton4 chips and other AWS chips like AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia to train and deploy future SAP business AI offerings.

Thousands of customers have selected RISE with SAP on AWS for their extensive SAP solution implementations. The availability of next-generation Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances, offering up to 32 terabytes of memory per instance, aims to support expanding SAP HANA database requirements. These instances are the first DDR memory-based 8-socket offering by a leading cloud provider, designed to improve the performance of memory-intensive applications such as the SAP S/4HANA suite.

Notably, Amazon's satellite broadband network initiative, Project Kuiper, is deploying RISE with SAP to manage its complex supply chain and manufacturing operations. The adoption of SAP solutions on AWS allows Project Kuiper to harness the latest SAP Business AI capabilities embedded in RISE with SAP, aiding in transformational decision-making and enhancing overall productivity.

The initiative seeks to bridge the digital divide by providing fast, affordable broadband to underserved areas globally. RISE with SAP facilitates a scalable and reliable infrastructure, enabling Project Kuiper to focus on innovation over IT management.