Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon, and SAP have announced an expanded strategic collaboration to enhance modern cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) experiences. This partnership aims to help enterprises drive new capabilities and efficiencies through generative artificial intelligence (AI).
The collaboration focuses on simplifying the adoption of the RISE with SAP solution on AWS, improving the performance and efficiency of SAP workloads in the cloud, and integrating generative AI across an enterprise’s business-critical applications.
“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, incoming CEO at 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.”
Generative AI models from Amazon Bedrock available on the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core
The generative AI hub in SAP AI Core infrastructure provides customers with secure access to a broad range of large language models (LLMs) that can easily be integrated into SAP business applications. With the integration of generative AI models from Amazon Bedrock such as the Anthropic Claude 3 model family and Amazon Titan, SAP customers will be able to access high-performing LLMs and other foundation models (FMs) to build applications customised with their own data. Tens of thousands of customers use Amazon Bedrock to easily, quickly and securely build and scale generative AI applications using FMs from leading AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon.
With this integration, SAP customers may accelerate the adoption of generative AI and modernise key business processes built on SAP solutions. These innovations can be used in embedded use cases within RISE with SAP and the intelligent scenario lifecycle management functionality as an integration component or side-by-side directly on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). SAP and AWS plan to expand the use of Bedrock capabilities in the generative AI hub to further enable embedded AI functionality within SAP’s portfolio of cloud solutions and applications. This includes additional use cases across finance and product lifecycle management.
“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,” said Christian Klein, Chief Executive Officer, SAP SE. “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.”
SAP to use AWS chips to train and deploy future SAP business AI offerings
SAP’s use of AWS Graviton3 chips to support SAP HANA Cloud helps to deliver performance gains, cost savings, and energy efficiency to SAP. By using Graviton3-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, SAP has realized up to 30% better compute for analytical workloads and an estimated 45% reduction in carbon footprint for SAP HANA Cloud. Now SAP and AWS are collaborating on the next generation of Graviton4 for SAP HANA Cloud and additional SAP applications to continue to improve performance and efficiency. Based on the success of running SAP HANA Cloud on AWS Graviton, SAP plans to use AWS Graviton to support SAP solutions and applications such as SAP BTP, SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and the SAP Cloud ALM solution.
SAP plans to use AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia chips, purpose built for AI and machine learning (ML) workloads, for training and deploying future SAP Business AI offerings. Using Trainium and Inferentia2-based instances in a proof of concept, SAP engineers trained and fine-tuned generative AI LLMs in two days versus 23 days with comparable Amazon EC2 instances. By leveraging Trainium’s specialised architecture designed for efficient ML model training, SAP can accelerate the development process while maintaining high levels of accuracy and reliability.
Increased performance for RISE with SAP on AWS
Thousands of customers have selected RISE with SAP on AWS to run their largest, most complex, global SAP solution implementations. Now generally available, the next-generation Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances offer up to 32TiB of memory in a single instance and provide customers the memory and flexibility they need to support expanding SAP HANA database requirements. Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances are the first DDR5 memory-based 8-socket offering by a leading cloud provider to improve the performance of memory-intensive applications such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud as part of RISE with SAP.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper selects RISE with SAP
Amazon companies, including Twitch, Zappos.com, and Zoox Inc., already use SAP software on AWS to support their operations. And now Project Kuiper—Amazon’s satellite broadband network—is deploying RISE with SAP to support its complex supply chain and manufacturing operations, and get the best performance and most value out of its mission-critical SAP software.
Running SAP solutions on AWS allows Kuiper to take advantage of the latest SAP capabilities embedded in RISE with SAP to help drive impactful transformation, accelerating company decisions and enhancing overall performance and productivity.
Hundreds of millions of people lack adequate internet access and Project Kuiper’s goal is to help close the digital divide by delivering fast, affordable broadband to a wide variety of customers operating in places without reliable internet connections. Delivering on that vision requires Kuiper to build satellites at an unprecedented rate. RISE with SAP allows the Project Kuiper team to leverage the most reliable and scalable infrastructure to run a modern, cloud ERP as a managed service, so they can focus on innovation instead of IT management.
