AWS and SAP Unlock New Innovation with Generative AI

May 29, 2024 at 08:00 AM EDT

Generative AI hub in SAP AI Core integrates with foundation models in Amazon Bedrock to deliver generative AI-driven insights and streamline manual processes for enterprise customers

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced an expanded, strategic collaboration to transform modern cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) experiences and help enterprises drive new capabilities and efficiencies with generative artificial intelligence (AI). Together, AWS and SAP are striving to make it easier for customers to adopt the RISE with SAP solution on AWS, to improve the performance and efficiency of SAP workloads running in the cloud, and to embed generative AI into an enterprise’s entire portfolio of 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.”

“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.”

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 customized 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 modernize 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.

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 specialized 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.

To learn more about the SAP and AWS partnership, tune in to the SAP Sapphire conference, June 3-5, in Orlando.

About Amazon Web Services

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.