SAP Releases Managed Data Intelligence Service, Updates Analytics Tools

SAP has gone live with new cloud-managed services designed to accelerate the deployment of solutions that aid in business decision-making by bringing together the company’s AI and machine learning technology and its data integration platform.

Launched earlier this year at its annual SAPPHIRE NOW  conference, the company last week used the SAP Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas and the Strata Data Conference in New York to announce the release of SAP Data Intelligence and  SAP Analytics Cloud managed service offerings. Among the latest updates to the SAP Cloud service, SAP Data Intelligence combines SAP Data Hub — a data integration service — with SAP’s machine learning capabilities. Until now, those functions were separate and offered piecemeal.

By bringing them together, the new service will lower the barrier of adoption of artificial intelligence, and for partners, make it easier to create AI-based solutions that gather data from different sources, according to Gerrit Simon Kazmaier, SAP’s executive vice president for database and analytics.

SAP’s Gerrit Kazmaier

“SAP Data Intelligence brings together our data integration assets — SAP Data Hub, which is  prime-time vehicle for data processing, orchestration and pipelining, in combination with our machine learning assets, Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation, and integrated them,” Kazmaier said, during an interview with Channel Futures at the Strata Data conference.

“What we essentially did was we combined those two assets — Data Hub as the integration foundation, plus the machine learning, and wrapped it together with everything that you need to bring this into production, and lower the boundary of adoption in the sense of what you need to scale the right pipelines to train and deploy the model and what you need from a life cycle perspective,” he said.

Currently, the company counts more than 1,400 partners that are building on its SAP Cloud Platform, and there are now in excess of 750 SAP Cloud Platform-based apps available in its SAP App Center. By integrating SAP Data Hub solution and SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation into the new SAP Data Analytics service, the company said partners can more rapidly build analytics solutions because it brings together existing open source machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, as well as SAP HANA and third-party data sources, thereby using AI to automate the tedious data cleansing process.

The SAP Analytics Cloud updates include an improved online analytics designer tool that make it easier to create custom analytics applications. It includes a service that can run queries against SAP Business Warehouse. It is also designed to navigate and run analysis of information directly from within the source catalog, which SAP said eliminates the need for added modeling. SAP has also updated search extension with live chat capability for applications that run against SAP HANA.

The designer is a tool that basically decomposes SAP’s applications into a set of APIs that partners can consume independent of the application stack, according to Kazmaier. That lets ISVs and systems integration partners build their own content, applications and services based on the SAP analytics stack, he added.

“We have some…

…partners on our content network already building their own analytics packages and now that we are extending more APIs and more kits, partners can build more planning applications, predictive applications and BI applications,” he said. “It’s not about what we can build at SAP or what customers can build from scratch. This is really making sure that, you know, the entire ecosystem has a way to codify their best practices around data analytics, blending, and then predictive applications.”

As with other SAP Cloud Platform services, the new SAP Data Analytics and SAP Analytics Cloud offerings are available in Amazon Web Services and will be added to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform subsequently.