Top Highlights from the 2019 SAP SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference

Another SAP SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference is in the books. 2019 will be remembered for a year of game-changing announcements and the Intelligent Enterprise continuing to grow momentum in the SAP ecosystem. We will have numerous blog posts over the next few weeks that will dive deeper into some of the key announcements and takeaways from our team of experts. For now, here are some of the major news announcements and highlights from the show.

SAP Paves the Path to Create Outcome-Based Intelligent Enterprises with Experience Management (XM)
Just three months after completing its acquisition of Qualtrics, SAP has rolled out 10 new offerings that combine experience data (X-data) with operational data (O-data) to measure and improve the four core experiences of business — customer, employee, product and brand. The rollout of this system sets a new standard in enterprise software

The combination enables organizations to continuously listen to the beliefs, emotions and intentions of customers, employees, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders. These new offerings — four for customer experience (CX), three for employee experience and three in market research — embed X-data directly into an enterprise’s applications, such as its CRM, ERP or HCM systems, to drive continuous action and improvement.

SAP Expands App Portfolio on Both iOS and Mac®
SAP and Apple announced that CORE ML®, Apple’s on-device machine learning technology, will be available for the first time as part of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS. The next version of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK, available later this month, enables businesses to create custom, intelligent iOS apps powered by SAP Leonardo. Machine learning models will automatically download to iPhone® and iPad® so apps can run offline, and then dynamically update while connected to SAP Cloud Platform.

Through the partnership with Apple, SAP has rebuilt its most popular mobile apps for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur solutions, along with SAP Asset Manager, to run natively on iOS. These apps are fully integrated with iPhone and iPad, to maximize security, performance and the latest platform innovations from Apple. SAP today announced it will expand its native iOS experience across its broader applications portfolio, starting with SAP Ariba solutions.

Building on the success of its iOS efforts, SAP also announced it will expand its app offerings to the Mac, with new apps that match the power and ease of use of SAP iOS apps. The new native Mac apps will bring the richness of the SAP iOS experience to the desktop world.
Read more about SAP and Apple...

SAP Extends Its Leadership in AI-Powered Intelligent ERP with SAP S/4HANA
SAP announced a series of innovations to SAP S/4HANA to make it easier to add artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, and to customize apps. This will help companies improve business results, automate business processes and make accurate predictions for better decisions.

With more than 100 out-of-the-box AI and robotic process automation–powered capabilities, the 1905 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud solidifies its position as the most intelligent ERP on the market today. The new additions, being released in May 2019, cement our goal announced in 2018 to automate 50 percent of manual tasks in the ERP system over the following three years. Examples of new AI capabilities include:

• Intelligent accruals management: Allows closing books faster with automated conversion of purchase order data into posted accruals
• Defect code proposal: Speeds up quality checks and increases data quality simultaneously with automated categorization of defects based on free-text entry
• Financial journal entry with intelligent robotic process automation: Automates the collection, extraction and validation of financial journal data from e-mails, and mass uploads the data into SAP S/4HANA

Read more about this announcement on SAP.com...

Introducing SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
SAP is introducing SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, which brings the power of SAP HANA performance and flexible modeling along with SAP BW/4HANA structured modelling into one enterprise-class cloud data warehouse. With pre-built templates, integration to SAP, hybrid modes with SAP HANA and SAP BW/4HANA, and other data sources, as well as the power of SAP HANA, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud delivers faster results, simple cloud-based end-user analytics, and the flexibility to control costs and pay-for-what-you-use.

One of the capabilities of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is powerful, integrated analytics-as-a-service with SAP Analytics Cloud.

SAP Analytics Cloud is continuing to build on existing augmented analytics capabilities that infuse artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into business intelligence and enterprise planning workflows in order to help users go from insight to action in a fraction of the time. The latest innovations push conversational analytics to the next level, with the user’s search and natural-language processing (NLP) experience in SAP Analytics Cloud now expanded to understand and leverage semantics across all of your data.

SAP HANA Cloud Services
SAP HANA Cloud Services will be the gateway to a single source of truth for all data, including transactional and analytical data, as well as structured and unstructured data across on premise and cloud. SAP HANA Cloud Services aim to make data of any size and shape available to people, algorithms, and data-driven applications with online access, providing cloud qualities like low total cost of ownership (TCO), elasticity, serverless principles, high availability, resilience, and autonomous behavior.

With SAP HANA at the core, the new solution will be built on the fastest in-memory computing engine. By making this engine elastic, it will be possible to scale out indefinitely, enabling customers to add more resources as they require — and reduce them when they don’t need them anymore. Building on technologies such as SAP IQ, SAP HANA Cloud Services also will also offer an SQL data lake as a storage layer at minimum cost.

This is just a small sampling of some of the major news and announcements at the 2019 SAP SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference. Our CEO, Chris Carter and new CTO, Sean Gilmour will provide you with more updates throughout the next few days and week. Plus we will more videos and announcements from the show floor.