Google Cloud delivers enhanced generative AI capabilities to SAP customers

Google Cloud and SAP SE say they’re building on their longstanding relationship with a number of new integrations across artificial intelligence and infrastructure aimed at helping SAP users better innovate and manage their data.

At SAP’s annual Sapphire event today, they announced a host of new offerings, including a new platform for managing supply chains that’s powered by AI, multiple Gemini updates that will infuse more generative AI capabilities within SAP workloads, an integrated analytics offering within SAP Datasphere, and new memory-optimized instances for computing SAP workloads.

The two companies have collaborated for years, with Google Cloud helping SAP’s customers to migrate their on-premises SAP business applications and data estates to the public cloud, where they can take advantage of its integrated cloud services.

A good example of this is today’s integration of Google Cloud’s Cortex Framework and Gemini AI models with SAP’s generative AI assistant Joule and its Integrated Business Planning for Supply Planning module.

The integration creates what Google says is an AI-powered, resilient supply chain that enables customers to better predict demand and mitigate risks. For instance, users will benefit from enhanced demand forecasting that taps into data sources such as marketing campaigns, the company said. Moreover, AI will help to identify supply chain risks such as possible disruption caused by inclement weather, while maintaining optimal inventory levels that take into account potential disruptions and peaks in demand.

RISE with SAP gets generative AI boost

The ongoing collaboration between Google Cloud and SAP also benefits RISE with SAP customers who either have migrated or are in the process of migrating their SAP environments to the Google Cloud platform. RISE with SAP is a cloud-based offering that’s designed to help customers transform their enterprise resource planning stacks and accelerate digital transformations by creating a path for them to shift everything to the cloud. It bundles various SAP services, including the SAP S/4HANA Cloud offering, SAP Business Technology Platform and more.

Although RISE with SAP works with any cloud platform, SAP’s preferred cloud partner is Google Cloud, as customers can take advantage of an array of integrations with its cloud services.

For instance, RISE with SAP customers benefit from the extension of the ABAP software development kit for Google Cloud to SAP’s Business Technology Platform. With the ABAP SDK, SAP BTP customers will be able to integrate various AI, analytics and automation capabilities into their business processes. Additionally, the Vertex AI platform is being integrated with the SAP Customer Database Platform to help improve customer experiences and enhance the predictability of business processes, the companies said.

Other unique benefits for RISE with SAP customers include the Gemini Assist for SAP feature that makes it possible to interact with SAP applications via a natural language interface, and the availability of multiple Gemini large language models in SAP’s GenAI Hub. With this, users can embed additional generative AI features alongside SAP’s Joule AI assistant in platforms such as S/4HANA, Ariba SuccessFactors and more, the companies said. SAP users will also be among the first to access new Gemini models as they’re launched, such as the new Gemini Flash model that was announced at Google I/O last month.

New instances and integrations for SAP customers

Special benefits for SAP customers on Google Cloud also extend to the cloud-based hardware they can access. As of today, Google said SAP customers will be able to access a new family of X4 cloud instances that have been engineered specifically with SAP workloads in mind.

The SAP HANA-certified X4 machine family includes 16, 24 and 32 terabyte instances designed to cater to SAP HANA online transactional processing and online analytical processing workloads. They feature up to 1,920 virtual central processing units per instance, which is double the number of vCPUs found in competing cloud offerings, with Hyperdisk block storage providing up to 10,000 megabits-per-second throughput, Google said.

Google said the X4 VMs will provide “exceptional reliability” for SAP workloads, with other benefits including access to a fully private network that avoids the public internet, ensuring enhanced security and lower latency than other offerings.

Last but not least, the companies say SAP Datasphere is being more tightly integrated with Google BigQuery. The integration between the two services is designed to help customers create an “end-to-end data cloud,” with SAP Datasphere pulling data from across various parts of a business and sending it all into BigQuery, a serverless data warehouse that allows it to be analyzed more easily.

Google said SAP Datasphere is now available via the Google Cloud Marketplace, and it’s being enhanced with a new Replication Flow feature that supports the bidirectional replication and federation of data within BigQuery. According to Google, the result of this is that customers can access a “petabyte-scale platform” for data science and data analytics workloads, as well as a foundation for machine learning and generative AI workloads.

Image: Google Cloud