SAP and AWS Expand Collaboration To Accelerate Gen AI Uptake
Key business solution applications leaders SAP and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will expand their strategic collaboration with the rollout of key initiatives chiefly designed to better help enterprises utilise Generative AI to drive new capabilities and efficiencies.
A key plank of the collaboration focuses on helping customers to adopt SAP’s cloud-based RISE with SAP solution on AWS, a move AWS says will not only aim to improve the performance and efficiency of SAP workloads, but allow enterprises to enmesh Generative AI through their portfolio of business-critical applications.
Incoming AWS CEO Matt Gorman said AWS had been the first cloud provider to support the SAP portfolio. “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,” he said.
The CEO of SAP SE, Christian Klein, said such collaborations were necessary for embedding generative AI solutions across SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, enabling customers to accelerate the pace of their own innovation.
Another key strategy sees SAP utilising AWS-developed chips to train and deploy future SAP business AI offerings, a move which aims to achieve considerable time savings.
In one proof of concept exercise utilising AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2 chips, SAP engineers were able to train and fine-tune Generative AI large language models (LLMs) in just two days, versus 23 days with comparable instances of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) chip.
EC2 is based on AWS’ Graviton3 technology, with SAP and AWS now collaborating on the next generation of Graviton4 for SAP HANA Cloud and additional SAP applications, which AWS said would continue to improve performance and efficiency.
Trainium’s specialised architecture was designed by AWS to promote efficient machine learning (ML) model training, enabling SAP to accelerate the development process while maintaining high levels of accuracy and reliability.
Additionally, the integration into SAP AI Core of generative AI models from Amazon Bedrock, such as the Anthropic Claude 3 model family and Amazon Titan, is set to provide customers with secure access to LLMs. With easily integration into their SAP business applications, AWS said customers would be empowered to modernise key business processes, and accelerate their adoption of Generative AI.