In the two days that SAP and the industry took over Orlando, Florida, Lemongrass witnessed a plethora of major product announcements, heard inspiring and innovative keynotes, and absorbed industry content via invaluable collaborative discussions.
Amongst the countless sales and product demonstrations that make this global landmark event so popular, one thing became clear: SAP is committed to helping businesses succeed in the digital age. There were three areas in which new solutions and partnerships were designed to help businesses seek optimization: sustainability, efficiency, and innovation.
Improved Sustainability
The topic of sustainability featured heavily in almost every discussion we joined. This was due, in large part, to SAP’s announcement of its Sustainability Footprint Management – a new cloud-based solution that helps businesses track and reduce their environmental impact.
It provides a single view of a company’s carbon footprint and helps businesses to identify and reduce their emissions. Beyond the direct benefits to our planet, this latest SAP tool is designed to reduce costs, improve business reputation, and ensure compliance with environmental regulations.
Increased Efficiency
Another strong theme promoted during Sapphire was efficiency and the need to ensure operations run at a smooth yet optimum performance. In line with this continual market requirement, SAP has launched the latest version of its cloud-based platform, SAP Business Technology Platform 2023.
This update includes a number of new features and capabilities, such as support for more programming languages and new integrations with other SAP solutions. The goal is to help organizations to improve their efficiency and productivity, which triggers a domino effect towards greater cost savings, better decision-making and overall business growth.
Enhanced Innovation
Something that we’ve known for a long time is that collaboration sparks new and exciting ideas. From there, with the right amount of skill, ingenuity and creativity, collaborative ideas will fuel business and market innovation.
Innovation within SAP is unquestionable, given that SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner dedicated portions of his keynote speech to this topic. Plattner affirmed that SAP is committed to investing in innovation and that the company is always looking for new ways to help customers improve their businesses.
Building off this, SAP has announced several new partnerships with leading technology companies, including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. These partnerships will enable SAP to offer its customers a wider range of cloud-based solutions and services to fuel innovation and stay ahead of the competition.
Trends to Watch
While sustainability, efficiency and innovation underpinned much of the discussion at SAP Sapphire this year, there were a few additional topics that caught the attention of the network. Two in particular that garnered a lot of interest were the applications of generative AI and utilizing data.
In the name of making business more agile, SAP has launched SAP Business AI with 15 new capabilities in partnership with industry giants like Microsoft and Google Cloud. This comes mere days after SAP announced extended partnerships with both companies. Microsoft’s enhanced partnership now includes plans to embed AI into the enterprise applications spaces where SAP and Microsoft collaborate. With Google Cloud, SAP further unites with them to enable customers to build an end-to-end data cloud bridging the enterprise landscape blending SAP’s Datasphere solution and Google’s data cloud.
The combination of generative AI and large language models (LLM) within SAP’s existing business process offering further drives organizations towards greater efficiency and continued innovation.
Equally important, SAP discussed the vital work it’s doing with several data platform providers to bring SAP and non-SAP data together. But, most importantly, utilizing this data together without having to manually shift data between the two systems. Some of these data partners include ALEPH ALPHA, databricks, data Robot and IBM.
In short, SAP Sapphire 2023 promoted the trends we’ll see within the industry in the upcoming years: innovation, efficiency and sustainability. It’s an exciting time for the sector and keep an eye out for creative products and solutions from both new entries into the sector as much as current industry leaders.