Dive Brief:
- SAP rolled out a set of new integrations, analytics tools and generative AI enhancements designed to help companies simplify data ecosystems and extract deeper insights, the company announced Wednesday.
- The ERP giant will embed its Joule copilot in SAP Analytics Cloud to automate the creation of reports and dashboards and develop an AI governance solution in partnership with Collibra, SAP said. Collibra, a data intelligence platform, launched an AI governance solution last month.
- SAP also added knowledge graphing capabilities to cloud-based data service SAP Datasphere, which it launched last year as the successor to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. Knowledge graphs generate insights from disparate data, enhance LLM performance and inhibit model hallucinations, according to SAP.
Dive Insight:
ERP systems are swimming in data that can fuel insights, predictive analytics and generative AI. SAP wants to help customers reap data’s benefits as part of a broader shift away from on-prem and hosted systems to a fully cloud-based SaaS ERP delivery and usage model.
The company said it plans to have a vector database capability generally available by the end of the first quarter to subscribers to the SAP HANA Cloud database management system. Vector databases are used for retrieval-augmented generation model training, as well as for recommendations, classifications and clustering, according to SAP.
While ERP modernizations are expensive upfront and potentially disruptive, the long term payoff is in continuous innovation and automatic upgrades, Liz Herbert, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, told CIO Dive.
Easing integrations is another upside.
The Datasphere ecosystem meshes with SAP’s cloud ERP and analytics solutions, as well as with non-SAP data products, according to the announcement, which included details of an integration partnership between SAP and Confluent.
“Core to the SAP data strategy is providing customers with the ability to interoperate with the world’s leading data and AI vendors through an open data ecosystem,” Irfan Khan, president and chief product officer, SAP HANA database and analytics, said in a Wednesday blog post.
