Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAP have announced an expanded strategic partnership aimed at transforming modern cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) experiences. This collaboration focuses on enhancing enterprise capabilities and efficiencies through the integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI). The goal is to streamline the adoption of the RISE with SAP solution on AWS, optimize the performance of SAP workloads in the cloud, and incorporate generative AI across an enterprise's suite 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. 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,” said Matt Garman, incoming CEO at AWS.
Generative AI integration with SAP AI Core
The generative AI hub within SAP AI Core infrastructure now provides secure access to a variety of large language models (LLMs) from Amazon Bedrock. These models, including the Anthropic Claude 3 family and Amazon Titan, are designed to integrate seamlessly with SAP business applications. This integration allows SAP customers to leverage high-performing LLMs and other foundational models (FMs) to develop applications tailored with their own data. With tens of thousands of customers using Amazon Bedrock, this collaboration allows for the rapid, secure, and scalable creation of generative AI applications. Leading AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, and Amazon contribute to these foundational models.
By incorporating generative AI, SAP customers can accelerate the adoption of AI technologies and modernize crucial business processes based on SAP solutions. These innovations are applicable within RISE with SAP and through intelligent scenario lifecycle management, either as integrated components or alongside SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). SAP and AWS aim to further expand Bedrock capabilities within the generative AI hub, enhancing AI functionality across SAP’s cloud solutions and applications, with potential use cases in finance and product lifecycle management.
SAP leverages AWS Graviton
SAP’s implementation of AWS Graviton3 chips in SAP HANA Cloud has yielded significant performance improvements, cost savings, and energy efficiency. Utilizing Graviton3-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, SAP has achieved up to 30% better computational performance for analytical workloads and a 45% reduction in carbon footprint for SAP HANA Cloud. Building on this success, SAP and AWS are collaborating on the next generation of Graviton4 chips to continue enhancing SAP HANA Cloud and other SAP applications, including SAP BTP, SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Cloud ALM.
Enhanced performance for RISE with SAP on AWS
Thousands of customers have chosen RISE with SAP on AWS to manage their largest and most complex global SAP implementations. Now generally available, the next-generation Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances offer up to 32TiB of memory in a single instance, providing the necessary capacity and flexibility to support expanding SAP HANA database requirements. These instances are the first DDR5 memory-based 8-socket offering by a leading cloud provider, enhancing the performance of memory-intensive applications such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud as part of RISE with SAP.
“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. 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,” said Christian Klein, Chief Executive Officer, SAP SE.
Elsewhere, Amazon Web Services has officially launched Amazon Q, a sophisticated AI-powered tool designed to enhance software development by leveraging internal corporate data.
