SAP TechEd 2017 HighLights from Customer Engagement perspective

Mark Peeters, 17 November 2017

Every Year SAP hosts the TechEd to inform customers and partners on the new technologies and road maps of their products. This year I was in the lucky position to attend the TechEd in Barcelona. In this blog I will give an overview of the topics discussed. The main attention area’s for me were Cloud Platform and API’s, IoT, Machine Learning and Blockchain.

SAP Cloud Platfrom and API Hub

SAP positions its Cloud Platform in the hart of all new technologies. The platform can now not only run on the SAP Data Centers but also on Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This enables customers to choose the platform best suited for their business. This can be because of geographical preference or existing implementations. During the presention of the key note in Star Trek style it was mentioned that world wide 5.4 million ABAP developers are registered. For all of them the good news is that ABAP will also continue its life cycle in the cloud and will be available for programming on the SAP Cloud Platform

Most of the new technologies rely on the use of API’s. SAP provides a simple access to all standard API’s that it provides. This is the API HUB. This is the place to Search, discover, experience and consume to right APIs from SAP and select partners for your digital transformation projects.

IoT

SAP delivers a lot of standard Services for implementing you IoT scenario. The services it delivers are clubbed into to segments SAP Leonardo IoT Edge and SAP Leaonardo IoT Foundation. Where IoT Edge is used to connect and Filter the outside world to your SAP Cloud Platform the IoT Foundation enables you to use and store the data received.

Machine Learning

The next step with acquiring all this data is an automated and intelligent processing of data. Also under the SAP Leonardo umbrella SAP offers several Machine Learning API’s. SAP Integrates with the machine learning product of Google called TensorFlow. From a Customer engagement view this has already lead to two implementations of Machine Learning in Cloud for Customer that are available since the 1711 release. Opportunity Scoring (Deal Scoring) and Service Ticket intelligence.

As the model needs to be trained on your own data, you need to have a significant set of data, but this does not have to be in SAP already. So the model can be trained on legacy data.

BlockChain

With the example of BitCoin everybody in IT is interested in the options that Block Chain can offer in a business context. Also in this aspect SAP delivers a standard API for Block Chain. For me the interesting part here is the idea of data sharing via Block Chain. As only trusted parties can write a record into your Block Chain, this enables fast sharing of data. You can think of encrypted digital blueprints, or the complete history of an airplane spare part. The Block Chain as a service of SAP allows the creation of a complete new set of applications, where the Block Chain is only a sort of shared data base, but the entire app runs on SAP Cloud platform for instance.