Diving into the key announcements from SAP Sapphire 2024

Diving into the key announcements from SAP Sapphire 2024

Now SAP Sapphire 2024 has been and gone, it’s time for our annual round-up of the key announcements and a quick look at how the industry has reacted.

Closing the digital skills gap by acquiring WalkMe

The big news coming out of Sapphire, as featured in diginomica, is SAP’s $1.5billion acquisition of WalkMe. SAP says the aim of this acquisition is to accelerate digital adoption amongst its customer base. In practice, this means tying together applications, processes, data and people to reduce end user friction with enterprise software.

By driving broad buy-in for digital transformation projects SAP aims to reduce the workload of a small number of ‘super users’ who drive technology use within their organisation.

Using generative AI to improve the user experience

SAP CEO Christian Klein placed Joule – SAP’s generative AI copilot – front and centre at Sapphire. He said that Joule “will turn your words into action […] and going forward, it will be embedded out of the box for all our cloud customers”. TechnologyMagazine covered this announcement, noting that this is an expansion of Joule’s current, limited availability.

Through a partnership with NVIDIA, SAP is planning to bring a suite of new capabilities to Joule. In an extension of its existing consulting capabilities, Joule will now be powered by NVIDIA NeMo Retriever, to drive retrieval augmented generation (RAG), by connecting SAP’s proprietary data with Joule’s AI capabilities. Using this RAG architecture, consultants working with SAP will be able to access SAP-specific information, and make use of it to meet their clients’ needs as they arise.

The NVIDIA partnership will also be used to assist the more than 5 million developers using SAP’s ABAP programming language. Joule’s ABAP Developer capabilities can help developers generate, complete and explain code as well as create software unit tests, allowing them to spend more time building and deploying features rather than manually writing code.

SAP stated that 80% of the most common tasks will be managed by Joule, meaning that the 300 million end users of SAP products will be 20% more productive. Joule’s use cases will also be expanded to include consulting capabilities and Joule for ABAP developer capabilities, which aims to help SAP’s consultant and developer community accelerate projects and implement solutions faster.

In addition to the wider availability of Joule, which is embedded in SAP S/4HANA Cloud solutions, SAP Build and SAP Integration Suite, SAP’s generative AI copilot now also integrates with Microsoft 365 Copilot, as part of an extended partnership with Microsoft. In addition to this partnership, SAP has also announced a number of expanded relationships with AI partners, including deals with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta and Google Cloud, all aiming to continue to improve SAP’s AI offering.

Additional announcements:

Other highlights from Sapphire include the news that RISE with SAP will now include a dedicated enterprise architect to guide customers through the RISE Methodology. Additionally, a new tool chain is being integrated to help manage the process, system, and data landscape holistically across the RISE with SAP lifecycle.

SAP is also expanding its Cloud ERP offering – GROW with SAP – to include SAP Sales Cloud and Concur Expense at no additional charge. These integrations will help with managing sales processes, improve forecast accuracy and access spending insights to better manage their expenses.

On the sustainability side, SAP has announced several innovations. SAPSustainability Control Towernow has a new capability that lets customers automatically report on their available environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. SAP has also announced its new carbon calculator engine to give customers access to the full scope of emissions reporting required to meet regulatory requirements.

As your user group, we will continue to follow the latest product developments so you can make the most informed decisions about your SAP investments.

Equally, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the areas you think we should push SAP to focus on, so feel free to get in touch with the team and share your feedback and ideas: www.sapusers.org/contact