I was very excited to attend the SAP TechEd in Bangalore in person in November. Two full days of knowledge gathering, amazing keynotes, meeting some friends and ex-colleagues, cheering for Mindset in the DemoJam finale, and at the end, the celebration night. It was all worth the wait.
SAP made some very exciting announcements. I was looking forward to gaining more insights into what’s new in SAP Integration Suite and what SAP has been doing in the much talked about GenAI area. From the demo pods, workshops and other sessions I attended, sharing some of my key takeaways and what I learned at the SAP TechEd.
I had built my TechEd agenda around the integration capabilities that are provided by SAP. One of the workshops I took up was about how we can use SAP Integration Suite along with SAP Build Process Automation (BPA) and advanced event mesh to automate business processes. This was a very interesting topic for me as this is something I had not done before. HR, payroll, procurement, and expense management are just some of the many examples where SAP Integration Suite together with event mesh and BPA can be leveraged to build effective and consistent business processes. This workshop helped me learn how these tools can be used together.
SAP also announced Edge Integration Cell, a new capability of SAP Integration Suite. It enables the customers to design their integrations in the cloud and then deploy and execute it in their on-premise systems.
Edge Integration Cell Architecture (Source: SAP)
With various Cloud offerings, some SAP customers still prefer to use on-premise environments. This could be, for example, due to data sensitivity. Hybrid Deployment using Edge Integration Cell allows such customers to design integrations in the Cloud but deploy and run in a private landscape.
Next I attended a demo pod session where the product team of SAP Integration Suite presented the new features to tackle the performance challenges that come up while working with Integration Suite. In my opinion, it will help developers identify the root cause and solve performance issues. We can get an analytical chart and map of the resources (storage, CPU, etc.) used in your integration flows and their efficiency. Which resource is causing the performance issue and insights into how to come to a resolution. That is terrific! This was a great learning experience for me since I have focused on performance every time I develop or change new features.
SAP Signavio, a business process intelligence solution, can be used with SAP Integration Suite and BPA to integrate the processes and systems and automate business operations. The keynote talked about this, and many demos focused on this Signavio capability. I’ve attended some hands-on sessions on the subject and am excited to explore how these tools work together.
The GenAI announcements included many new features:
- ABAP Cloud: GenAI assisted coding for developers in BTP.
- SAP announced Joule, the generative AI assistant that uses natural language.
- GenAI in SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC): with the help of the “just ask” feature, users can now get some analytical insights into the business using natural language queries (e.g., ‘Profit by category’).
- Generative AI hub at SAP AI Core to help develop BTP apps using GenAI.
- Reusable AI assets in SAP AI Launchpad as part of SAP AI Business services.
- Using Joule copilot, SAP Build Code provides an AI-based environment for application development.
In short, GenAI was everywhere at TechEd. It will be interesting to see how much of it will be used in real-time businesses.
I also came across one of the GenAI hands-on workshops where SAP has partnered with DataRobot to utilize its multimodal machine learning capabilities in business data and processes. Interesting!
Summarizing my learnings from SAP TechEd, I focused on the Integration Suite. I did take away a new perspective on how we can leverage it with other tools. It was exciting to learn new innovations in integration, automation and how GenAI is weaved into the threads of SAP offerings. The amount of learning has been immense and now I am all set to explore further in it.
