The SAP BTP and Clean + Core enabled by AI

SAP is sometimes seen as a solid engineering company with a great past. Now SAP is transforming itself with re-engineered and new products to compete in the AI arms race.

SAP Business Technology Platform Components

1. Unified Platform: SAP BTP brings together application development, automation, data and analytics, integration, and AI capabilities in one unified environment. This allows companies to create personalized experiences across business processes and build applications, analytics, and integrations faster.
2. Optimized for SAP Applications: SAP BTP is specifically designed to work seamlessly with SAP applications, allowing for native integration and connectivity to other apps and data sources.
3. Low-Code/No-Code Development: SAP BTP offers low-code and no-code development tools like SAP Build, enabling both professional developers and business users to innovate quickly.
4. Pre-built Content: The platform provides pre-built data models, integrations, workflows, content-rich APIs, and AI business services across many application areas, speeding up innovation.
5. Partner Ecosystem: SAP has a thriving partner ecosystem that leverages SAP BTP to deliver new applications, integrations, and content, providing more personalized solution experiences for customers.
6. Support for "Shift-Right" Approach: SAP BTP supports moving customizations, data management, and AI capabilities to the platform layer rather than embedding them in the core ERP system, keeping the SAP core clean.
7. Flexible Deployment: Companies can run SAP BTP on major cloud providers' infrastructure, fully managed by SAP, providing flexibility and scalability.
8. Integration Capabilities: SAP Integration Suite, part of BTP, allows for connecting on-premise and cloud-based processes, services, and applications.
9. AI and Machine Learning: SAP BTP includes AI services like SAP AI Core, AI Launchpad, and AI Services, enabling businesses to incorporate advanced AI capabilities into their operations. Leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities through SAP AI Business Services, SAP Leonardo, and SAP Machine Learning. In addition can leverage the LLMs such as Meta 3.1 405 B model, Gemini, Mistral, Watsonx Granite, Anthropic Claude, etc.

Cloud & Clean Core Strategy

The clean core strategy aims to keep the S/4HANA system as close to standard as possible, minimizing customizations within the core. This SAP's Cloud & Clean Core strategy aims to simplify and modernize the core ERP system by:

1. Moving to the cloud (SAP S/4HANA Cloud)
2. Standardizing and simplifying business processes
3. Reducing customizations and technical debt
4. Focusing on innovation and digital transformation
5. Facilitates easier upgrades and maintenance
6. Enables faster adoption of new innovations
7. Reduces technical debt and associated risks

The cloud aspect of this strategy involves leveraging cloud-based solutions and services to enhance flexibility and scalability.

SAP LeanIX

SAP LeanIX is a cloud-based enterprise architecture management (EAM) tool that helps organizations:

1. Visualize and manage their IT landscape
2. Align IT with business strategy
3. Optimize application portfolios
4. Improve IT governance and compliance
5. Enterprise Architecture management
6. IT portfolio management
7. Business capability mapping

Signavio

Signavio is a cloud-based business process management (BPM) and enterprise architecture (EA) tool that:

1. Enables process modeling and simulation
2. Supports business process analysis and optimization
3. Integrates with SAP systems for process automation

Cloud ALM

Cloud ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) is a cloud-based platform that:

1. Manages the entire application lifecycle
2. Supports agile development and DevOps practices
3. Integrates with SAP systems for application development and deployment

Generative AI

1. SAP Business AI Strategy: SAP is focusing on integrating AI capabilities, including generative AI, directly into its business applications and cloud solutions. This approach aims to solve specific business problems rather than competing in the general-purpose AI platform market.
2. Joule - SAP's AI Copilot:

• Joule is being infused with multiple autonomous, collaborative AI agents that work across the business to deliver connected, cross-enterprise outcomes.
• It will support 80% of SAP's most-used business tasks by the end of the year.
• Joule will be integrated into SAP Analytics Cloud to help users get work done faster and drive better business outcomes.

SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP):

• SAP is introducing AI Foundation, a new hub in BTP that will empower developers to create AI- and GenAI-powered extensions and applications.
• The generative AI hub in SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad will allow developers to build, customize, and deploy complex AI-driven solutions more efficiently.

SAP Datasphere:

• Built on SAP BTP, Datasphere enables integration and a unified view of semantically rich SAP data with third-party data.
• It will incorporate generative AI capabilities to help customers adapt faster to market changes and make more efficient decisions.

Integration with NVIDIA:

• SAP is partnering with NVIDIA to accelerate generative AI adoption across its cloud solutions.
• They plan to integrate generative AI into SAP Datasphere, SAP BTP, and RISE with SAP.
• SAP will use NVIDIA's generative AI foundry service to fine-tune Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain-specific scenarios.

Industry-Specific Use Cases:

• SAP is exploring over 20 generative AI use cases across various applications:Automating enterprise resource planning with intelligent invoice matching in SAP S/4HANA CloudImproving human resources use cases in SAP SuccessFactorsAccelerating insights from SAP Signavio for better process recommendations

Developer Tools:

• SAP plans to use generative AI to assist developers working with the ABAP programming language, building on its ABAP Cloud model and SAP Cloud Application Programming model.

Responsible AI:

• SAP emphasizes its commitment to data privacy and AI ethics, ensuring that customer data shared with LLMs is not used for retraining without consent.

SAP AI Foundation:

AI Foundation is a set of AI services and tools on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) that enables developers to incorporate AI capabilities into applications and extensions. Here's a comprehensive overview based on the search results:

1. Purpose and Scope: AI Foundation is a one-stop-shop for developers to bootstrap their own Business AI solutions. It allows creation of AI-powered extensions and applications, including generative AI capabilities, on SAP BTP and beyond.
2. Key Components: a. AI Services (AI Business Services): Ready-to-use, reusable AI services categorized into: Intelligent Document Processing (e.g., Document Information Extraction) Conversational AI Data Intelligence

b. AI Workload Management:

• SAP AI Core: For training and deploying AI models at scale
• SAP AI Launchpad: For managing AI scenarios and monitoring deployments

c. Generative AI Hub:

• Provides access to various large language models (LLMs) from different providers
• Offers tools for prompt engineering, experimentation, and integration of foundation models

d. SAP Foundation Models (coming soon):

• Fine-tuned generic LLMs on SAP anonymized data
• Proprietary foundation models based on SAP's structured business data

1. Key Features: Integration with SAP's business applications and data Access to a wide range of LLMs and AI models Tools for developing, deploying, and managing AI solutions Focus on responsible AI and data privacy
2. Benefits: Accelerates productivity for developers and data professionals Enables building of custom AI solutions using SAP and third-party data Provides secure access to trusted AI capabilities Streamlines AI integration into business processes
3. Use Cases: Automating document processing Enhancing application development with generative AI Improving process automation Creating industry-specific AI solutions (e.g., citizen reporting app for public administrations)
4. Integration: Works seamlessly with other SAP BTP services like Cloud Foundry, SAP HANA Cloud, and SAP Authorization and Trust Management Service

Integration of these components:

1. Use Signavio to analyze and optimize business processes.
2. Leverage LeanIX to map out the IT landscape and plan the transformation.
3. Implement S/4HANA with a clean core approach, minimizing core modifications.
4. Utilize BTP components for necessary extensions and customizations outside the core.
5. Manage the lifecycle of the solution using Cloud ALM.

Conclusion and Benefits of this approach;

Instead of spending millions re-engineering the core, the approach focuses on keeping the core clean and performing innovation in the 'Systems of Innovation' layer where AI tools operate. These components and tools work together to enable organizations to:

• Develop and deploy custom applications
• Automate business processes
• Analyze and optimize data
• Integrate with other systems
• Leverage AI and machine learning
• Simplify and modernize their core ERP system
• Manage their IT landscape and business processes
• Improve application lifecycle management