- SAP Managed Tags
1. SAP’s Fly-wheel Concept
It's like that classic physics concept, the flywheel. Getting it started takes a real push, a significant effort, but once it's spinning, inertia and the fundamental laws of motion kick-in. Suddenly, moving forward becomes easier and easier. The key is laying that solid foundation, building the basics.
SAP has truly found its own "sweet-spot" with this flywheel effect, and it's a concept that's resonating powerfully. SAP’s “fly-wheel” – Applications, Data and AI.
2. Application: Welcome (back) to the Business Suite. This time, suite-as-a-service.
"The application layer will be commoditized!" This isn't so far-fetched when you consider the landscape. The Cloud era has undeniably supercharged the "best-of-breed" SaaS world – if you have a business challenge, there’s almost certainly an app designed to tackle it. Infrastructure, while critical and pervasive, has also settled into a commodity status. And then there's AI, poised to take all of this into an entirely new orbit.
Imagine, anyone with a vision can now leverage AI and AI Agents to conjure up a SaaS application.
While Business Applications present a tougher nut to crack, they're no longer confined to the realm of impossibility for this new wave of creation.
SAP, foreseeing this trajectory, is making a significant bet: to bring a unifying cohesion to the myriads of heterogeneous "best-of-breed" solutions by championing a "best-of-suite" aka, ‘SAP Business Suite’ approach.
3. Data: A big-bang direction: SAP Business Data Cloud
Ultimately, every organization is on a quest to find that ideal path—to transform their transactional, critical systems into powerhouses of insight that fuel the very next decision. Yes, you could turn to workflow platform providers or lean on various Infrastructure platform providers. However, over time, a more enduring strategy makes sense: getting closer to the source of truth, ideally without the friction and complexity of constantly moving data.
This becomes especially compelling if such an approach comes with readily available, "out-of-the-box" insights, aptly named ‘Insight Apps.’
4. AI: Joule, Joule Agents and AI Foundation
Last year, the plan was to streamline, at least, 80% of common daily tasks into Joule skills (i.e., Joule will help you do the tasks instead of you looking to find the exact Fiori page for said transaction). Currently, Joule has 1600 out-of-the-box skills!
Now, Joule Agents will be coming soon; they will connect these skills and introduce a new agentic workflow, where the fundamental way of executing daily tasks will be reimagined and simplified further, with agents able to do more and more tasks.
Both Joule and Joule Agents rely on a trusted AI foundation by SAP.
Also, the impact, as announced last year, is not limited to end-users. Joule is also available as SAP Joule for Consultants (GA Announced at Sapphire!) and SAP Joule for Developers.
5. Partnerships: Joule available everywhere.
The Microsoft Co-pilot <-> Joule integration was a highlight of last year. This year, in a real demo, we saw Joule working closely with other SaaS applications to truly make the customer experience seamless. We saw Joule in ServiceNow, where an urgent ticket highlighted a material defect. Joule, working along with WalkMe, summarized the issue and suggested finding a new supplier. Joule, in SAP Ariba, then took care of the supplier identification. For checking pricing, Joule talked with Gemini to search Gmail for better offers.
You get the idea. Joule is the co-pilot for enterprises, powered by SAP, and can work with the rest of the application stack that a customer might have.
6. Perplexity – SAP Partnership: bringing unstructured data and answers to structured data
Perplexity is one of the killer apps of the GenAI Age. Perplexity defines itself as the ‘answer engine’. Instead of ten blue links, it gives you an answer that you can really trust, with citations.
The idea is – Perplexity provides this service to knowledge workers from the internet; SAP, and SAP’s Joule, do this for the Enterprise data realm. Together, customers get the best of both worlds in a managed approach. Lots to be seen as this partnership evolves.
7. Insight to Action TO Reason and Act
Insight to Action was a mantra – a key principle that brought us to the current state-of-affairs. Basically, you do advanced analytics, figure out insights, get wisdom from the data, and then do the next logical step, i.e., make actions.
The new world is even bolder: instead of you, the human, making judgments based only on your experience, your learning, your tenure, your role, your rank, etc., you now make those judgments supported by a vast system of AI models that help you “Reason” why things are happening (the insights). Armed with this, you are much more empowered to make sound Actions.
8. Integrated Toolchain
The word ‘toolchain’ in simple English means – 1. Tools: basically, the items you need to get something fixed properly. Imagine them as the assets that a mechanic has at his disposal to fix your car. The wrench, the garage, the lift. And 2. Chain: it is not one tool that you need to fix your car but a couple of them working together.
The “Integrated Toolchain” from SAP is exactly that: several tools coming together to ‘fix’ your car. In this case, though, it's not about the car, but a move from your monolithic ERP system to a modular SAP Business Suite.
The tools in the Toolchain: Cloud ALM, Signavio, LeanIX, BTP, Build, and WalkMe.
9. Engagement Plans – Soft-launch
There is a simplified approach to SAP’s services and support model, which is critical to a lot of customers. The new model is a tiered model designed for simplicity and to supercharge the journey to Business AI.
This move streamlines and evolves familiar offerings like Enterprise Support, Preferred Success, and MaxAttention into three clear, progressive levels: Foundational, Advanced, and Max.
The Foundational plan, an evolution of Enterprise Support, gets everyone started, "turning on tooling" for AI and providing essential learning.
Advanced, inspired by Preferred Success: SAP will actively help "build and activate the embedded AI cases" in your cloud solutions.
Max – for a deep strategic partnership, the Max tier, echoing MaxAttention, helps you "define a holistic AI strategy and build prototypes for customer AI cases
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