Highlights:

  • The cloud computing business of GGoogle LLC and SAP SE, a German software giant, established a partnership to make it easier for clients to mix enterprise data from different sources to uncover new insights and enable artificial intelligence.
  • The expanded partnership between Google Cloud and SAP will benefit clients in various industries, including inventory and supply chain management, commerce, and marketing.

The cloud computing division of Google LLC and SAP SE, a German software company, announced that they are collaborating to simplify combining enterprise data from disparate sources for customers to discover new insights and use the data to power AI.

Google Cloud is pivotal in assisting enterprises in migrating their on-premises SAP business applications and data estates to the public cloud. Nevertheless, the two companies have been long-standing technology partners.

Recently, they announced that they are shifting their focus to assisting customers in building an “end-to-end data cloud.” The objective is to use SAP Datasphere to pull data from various business sections and send it to BigQuery, Google Cloud’s fully managed and serverless data warehouse service. It can be checked and used to train multiple AI programs more efficiently.

It’s an important announcement for both businesses. Google Cloud lags behind its cloud-competing competitors, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp., but it recently posted its first profitable quarter. Expertise in AI is viewed as a distinct differentiator for the company’s cloud platform. SAP, the greatest software company in Europe, is eager to increase its relevance in the cloud.

The expanded partnership between Google Cloud and SAP will benefit clients in various industries, including inventory and supply chain management, commerce, and marketing. The primary advantage is that it will eradicate common data divisions across multiple business departments, including marketing, sales, finance, etc. Therefore, customers with wholesale business distribution models will have complete visibility over their products from entering the sales pipeline until they reach consumers.

Customers will reap the benefits of more standardized datasets and the ability to use AI to investigate them. Using Google Cloud’s tools, a store manager could, for instance, query a chatbot to determine how well-stocked a specific branch is.

Using Google Cloud’s diverse AI and machine learning services, businesses can train models on SAP and non-SAP system data. Data originating from SAP systems can be a precious asset, containing crucial information applicable to supply chain management, financial forecasting, and human resource planning, among other applications.

Thomas Kurian, the Chief Executive Officer of Google Cloud, stated that the new offering would help joint customers actualize their AI ambitions much more rapidly. Thomas Kurian said, “SAP and Google Cloud now offer an incredibly comprehensive and open data cloud, providing a foundation for the future of enterprise AI. By deeply integrating SAP data and systems with our data cloud, customers will be able to utilize our analytics capabilities, as well as advanced AI tools and large language models, to find new insights from their data.”

SAP has recently sought to expand its AI capabilities in other areas. It will integrate IBM Watson AI with its digital assistant SAP Start, a unified entry point into its cloud-based software. This partnership was announced earlier this month.

Charles King of Pund-IT, Inc. told a leading media house that the IBM partnership is about simplifying the use of SAP’s various applications and tools. In contrast, the Google Cloud integration is more about creating a hybrid cloud environment, accelerating and simplifying data access, and using data assets better.

Charles King said, “The larger story here is that while the market and many in the media seem fixated by the future potential of ChatGPT and OpenAI, SAP and its partners are moving quickly to leverage AI tools and solutions to measurably aid their enterprise customers today.”