SAP TechEd 2024 - Summary

[sonamthote]

SAP TechEd 2024 delivered an inspiring keynote with a strong focus on how technology drives real-world business innovations. This session brought to light the latest advances in AI, cloud solutions, and SAP's vision for the future of enterprise software.

The keynote opened with a thought-provoking introduction about the human brain, its complexities, and how innovation emerges from millions of connections forming new ideas. This metaphor seamlessly tied into SAP's philosophy of turning ideas into tangible solutions—where concepts become tools for solving real business problems.

Innovation at the Heart of SAP’s Strategy

One of the central themes was the growing importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in SAP’s offerings. AI is now deeply integrated into SAP’s cloud-driven portfolio, designed to simplify customers' lives and meet evolving business needs. Senior AI Scientists at SAP are working on harnessing AI to make business software smarter and more intuitive. The keynote also emphasized SAP's efforts to ensure that its software is configurable, extensible, and unified, providing a seamless suite-like experience across its platforms.

SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)

A significant highlight was SAP's Business Technology Platform (BTP), which has seen rapid growth in customer adoption. BTP is the cornerstone for SAP’s cloud and AI-driven future, empowering businesses with application development, automation, data analytics, and AI capabilities all within one unified platform. The keynote highlighted that over 27,000 live customers and 2,800 partners are leveraging SAP BTP to drive innovation.

The announcement of new BTP regions running on infrastructure from partners like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, along with SAP-managed data centers, shows SAP’s commitment to providing broader regional coverage and reliable service. This expansion aims to help businesses operate globally while maintaining efficiency, security, and compliance.

Enhancements in Application Development and Automation

SAP unveiled its Clean Core Strategy, which allows businesses to build custom extensions in a way that keeps the core ERP system maintainable and upgradeable. With SAP’s low-code environment, developers can create AI-powered applications with ease, while ABAP Cloud now supports both on-stack and side-by-side development, giving businesses more flexibility in their customizations.

One exciting feature introduced was the SAP Build Extensibility Wizard, a tool designed to streamline the process of creating custom fields and extensions, allowing users to enhance SAP applications with minimal coding.

SAP Build and GenAI

In keeping with the AI theme, SAP showcased the GenAI capabilities within SAP Build. With Joule, an AI assistant, developers can create complex data models, build extensions, and generate applications through natural language prompts. This AI-driven approach reduces manual coding and helps users integrate advanced functionalities like time series forecasting and predictive analytics into their business processes.

Data and Analytics Innovations

The keynote further highlighted innovations in data and analytics, specifically focusing on SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Datasphere. The HANA Cloud Vector Engine and Knowledge Graph Engine were introduced, both of which enable businesses to harness structured and unstructured data for more context-aware AI-driven decisions. These engines promise faster and more accurate data processing, particularly in scenarios involving large language models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

Additionally, the keynote showcased how SAP Datasphere is being adopted by large enterprises like Hershey’s and Bosch for data cataloging, integration, and self-service analytics, empowering businesses to access trusted data with ease.

Integration Suite and AI-Driven Optimization

The SAP Integration Suite now offers a modern, AI-powered solution for real-time end-to-end business process integration. With thousands of pre-built integrations and connectors, businesses can seamlessly integrate SAP and third-party applications. SAP is also leveraging AI-generated recommendations to optimize custom scripts, further enhancing developer productivity and reducing memory consumption.

Conclusion

SAP TechEd 2024 demonstrated SAP’s unwavering commitment to making innovation accessible, impactful, and transformative. From the integration of advanced AI capabilities to the expansion of BTP, SAP is setting a new standard in enterprise software. Whether you are looking to enhance your application development, automate processes, or harness the power of data, SAP’s latest innovations offer powerful tools to bring your ideas to life.

As SAP continues to evolve, the future of enterprise technology is more connected, intelligent, and adaptable than ever before.

[yogananda]

@sonamthote 

Thank you for the summary.

https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/fire-of-innovations-highlights-from-sap-teched-...