Innovations Highlights from SAP Business Technology Platform - TechEd 2023

[Stephanie_Stang]

I can just repeat what I´ve already mentioned in my last blog post: What an amazing TechEd 2023! GenAI was of course one the hottest topics. But in this blog post I want to focus on the most important announcements of SAP BTP at TechEd 2023 (also non-AI related) and in addition to innovation highlights coming up in the future. Excited? Then I hope you will enjoy reading on.

SAP Build Code

Last year at TechEd we announced SAP Build, our new brand for (back then) our low-code/ no-code offering for development and automation. With already 10k customers, this addition to SAP BTP has been quite successfull. This year, at TechEd 2023, we have taken another step to strenghten the value of SAP Build further with the announcement of new our pro-code offering - SAP Build Code. SAP Build Code is optimized for Java and JavaScript development that follows the SAP cloud application programming model (CAP) and it brings lots of new capabilities in SAP BTP together in order to help you develop, code, test, integrate, and operate your SAP BTP based solutions. Of course, we also integrate generative AI capabilities and have Joule on board to help with generating applications (code generation is not only part of our plans for CAP development, but we also intend to accelerate ABAP developement with GenAI capabilities). SAP Build Code will initially be available to selected customers and partners and is planned to become generally available in Q1 2024.



 

SAP HANA Cloud vector database capabilites

SAP HANA Cloud will natively store and search vector embeddings, which are numerical representations of objects, along with business data as part of its industry-leading multi-model processing capabilities to power intelligent data applications. With these vector capabilities, SAP HANA Cloud will enable Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), facilitating the combination of LLMs with private business data. These applications learn and adapt to new information, enabling automated decision-making and empowering developers to be the architects of the future. These innovations are planned to be available in Q1 2024.

Just Ask

One of my favorite highlights is Just Ask. Can´t wait to see it live. With this AI-powered queries for analytics in natural language you can retrieve and present data stored in SAP Analytics Cloud data models via natural language queries. The user simply types the question in natural language into the search field and receives the required insights. The systems generates charts that show the data you asked for, so you can easily understand the data.

SAP Datasphere semantic onboarding

Earlier this year, SAP launched SAP Datasphere, a business data fabric built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) that enables every data professional to deliver seamless and scalable access to mission-critical business data. As of TechEd 2023, we are ready for the next step and we will deliver semantic onboarding in SAP Datasphere. This new capability will help organizations delivering meaningful data to every data consumer with business context and logic interaction. A key benefit is the ability to import entities where you can bring in business context from underlying source systems and make re-use of semantical definitions and associations. Starting your data projects from scratch is a thing of the past. The release is planned for Q4 2023.

SAP Integration Suite Edge Integration Cell

We are also concentrating on our flagship - SAP Integration Suite. So we also have highlights in this are: The Edge Integration Cell is now generally available. It provides a local deployment option on SAP Integration Suite and the cloud based environment can be deployed on Cloud based infrastructures or on your private landscape. Check out the blog post of piyush.gakhar to read about the previous announcement and learn more on Edge Integration Cell.

Generative AI Hub

Already today, the AI Foundation enables developers to quickly integrate AI into their applications. Later this quarter, the AI Foundation will include a generative AI hub in SAP AI Core, giving developers instant access to a broad range of large language models (LLMs) from our partners like Azure OpenAI and Falcon-400. With this access, developers can orchestrate multiple models. The hub also provides tooling for prompt engineering, experimentation, and other capabilities to accelerate the development of generative AI applications. The generative AI hub will also connect to SAP HANA Cloud vector database.

SAP BTP Cockpit

[Labs preview] Onboarding to SAP BTP and setting-up your SAP BTP landscape will become much more easier in the future. Our generative AI-based assistant, Joule, will be integrated into the SAP BTP cockpit and will help to automate cumbersome tasks like onboarding of users, creating SAP BTP subaccounts and managing service subscriptions and entitlements.

SAP BTP Guidance Framework

Finally, if you want to know your best way develop extensions and applications on SAP BTP, I can only recommend the new SAP BTP Guidance Framework, your compass for architecting, implementing, and operating solutions on SAP BTP. Our new Developer´s Guide for SAP BTP is one new resource within the SAP BTP guidance framework which will help you how to implement business applications on SAP BTP using ABAP Cloud and SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP).

 

You did not make it in person or virtually? No worries, you still have the chance to watch the replays and especially the Executive Keynote of Juergen Mueller. Also take the opportunity to exchange with experts in our SAP TechEd group or in our SAP BTP community.

Interested in more innovation highlights coming up? Then take a look at our Road Map Explorer. We do have more than 1000 innovation highlights in there for SAP BTP 2023 and already 400 coming up for 2024.