SAP at its TechEd conference delivered its share of AI agent headlines as its Joule generative AI becomes one assistant across its platform, but as a more practical matter more developer options for ABAP and data lake capabilities will have a much larger impact.
The goal for SAP is to move its custom SAP ECC code to S/4 clean code as soon as possible and the company outlined a series of moves to make that happen faster with a big assist from generative AI.
At TechEd, SAP said it will enable ABAP developers to generate rate high-quality code with its Joule generative AI copilot to comply with SAP's ABAP cloud development model. According to SAP, "Joule will also be able to generate explanations for legacy code, making it easier to modernize legacy codebases and migrate to a clean core." ABAP is a programming language that runs in the SAP ABAP runtime environment, created and used by SAP for the development of application programs.
Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller did a deep dive on the implications for ABAP developers, which will get extended customer fields, business logic and processes. Mueller noted that the ABAP additions to SAP Build will give SAP the ability to update legacy code at scale. ABAP has 2 million active developers.
By the end of 2024, SAP Build will include access from ABAP development tools and environments for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The integration will enable developers to create and monitor ABAP Cloud projects in SAP Build.
- SAP’s Joule everywhere plan: ‘We are not developing AI just for the sake of AI”
- SAP Q2 cloud ERP revenue up 33%, sees restructuring hitting 9,000 to 10,000 jobs
- Amazon Bedrock integrated into SAP AI Core, SAP to use AWS chips
- SAP acquires WalkMe for $1.5 billion
- Boomi aims to ease SAP Datasphere migrations
The other big move by SAP revolved around new embedded data lake features for SAP Datasphere. By the end of the fourth quarter, Datasphere will have a data lake option to complement existing storage. Businesses will be able to analyze data across hybrid environments and preserve context and logic.
SAP said the data lake capabilities include:
- An integrated object store for more efficient data transformation and processing.
- Spark compute based on existing Datasphere data integration.
- The ability to access data on integrated object stores without physically copying the data.
- Ultimately, users will be able to import and integrate data at scale from SAP sources and non-SAP sources.
Mueller said:
"SAP shows broad investment across its technology platform, which is the key focus for all enterprise software vendors, readying their SaaS suites for the era of Infinite Computing. SAP with its new data lake capabilities adds (for the first time) object storage abilities. With this move, SAP for the first time gives customers the chance to holistically build next generation of applications powered by AI on its platform. Equally is important that SAP finally shows some love to its 2M+ active ABAP developers with support of ABAP in SAP Build, as well as making Joule available in ABAP. Critical for the ecosystem is that SAP now finally allows partners to build custom ABAP Code in SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Public Edition – a key move to help SAP customers to upgrade to S/4HANA. The impact of these three makes the solid progress on AI pale, where SAP shows the right execution – widening and deepening Joule capabilities. What stands out for Joule is the design point to have a single AI assistant across SAP."
Here's a look at everything announced at TechEd:
- SAP Build will get the ability to give Joule custom skills as well as use SAP HANA Cloud to ground large language models using its vector engine.
- Joule will get multiple AI agents that will combine business function expertise with the ability to carry out complex workflows. Joule will bring together specialized AI agents in areas like supply chain, procurement and finance.
- SAP will add two out-of-the-box autonomous AI agent use cases including dispute management for incorrect or missing invoices, duplicate payments and the like and a financial accounting use case to streamline financial processes.
- Joule will support 80% of SAP's most used business tasks by the end of the year. Joule will also be available in SAP Service Cloud and SAP Concur as well as SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Simply put, Joule will be integrated into all of SAP's clouds.
- SAP Knowledge Graph launched as a business context tool that is preloaded with ABAP tables, CDS views, APIs, and key data models so enterprises can ground AI models.
- The company said it added Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet via Amazon Bedrock to its generative AI hub along with the addition of IBM Granite foundation models, Meta Llama 3.1 and Mistral Large 2 and Codestral.
- SAP Generative AI Hub gets improvements to customize pre-trained AI models, a new software development kit, and new regions from the big three hyperscale cloud providers.
