New Way Now: SAP fuels innovation by transforming data into solutions with AI-powered analytics
35Summary: Frederik Pohl, vice president and head of strategic cloud management at SAP, leads the team responsible for orchestrating the enterprise software giant’s cloud strategy across their own infrastructure and with large partners like Google. He discusses how the long co-engineering relationship between SAP and Google has resulted in ways for SAP customers to turn their data into innovative solutions with AI-powered analytics on Google Cloud.
Challenge: SAP wanted to completely transform its entire cloud computing landscape to support its investment integrating AI into its applications to optimize user experience. But a diverse technology stack — grown primarily through acquisitions over several years — made a unified cloud solution elusive.
Solution: SAP chose Google Cloud to be one of the key cornerstones of a cloud strategy that would scale along with its growing customer base. Developed in tandem, the cloud migration plan included a capacity management process to ensure SAP had the infrastructure it needed to support its applications. This process was so efficient, SAP was able to successfully migrate 5,000 Ariba customers off its legacy systems to Google Cloud in just 17 hours. The migration has also served to support SAP’s ambition of becoming the No. 1 business AI company, providing access to the latest AI technologies, including generative AI. Using Vertex AI and Gemini through the SAP Business Technology Platform, customers now have new opportunities to gain actionable insights from their data using natural, everyday language.
Results: Together, SAP and Google Cloud are delivering innovative solutions that help organizations seize the AI opportunity to drive digital transformation and gain more value from their most critical business data. For example, the SAP Datasphere for BigQuery enables customers to query SAP data with BigQuery in real time — without having to move or copy data. With thousands of customers already using SAP AI solutions, the company plans to continue integrating gen AI into its applications to offer even more intuitive ways to turn words into data-driven value.
Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Frederik Pohl, Vice President and Head of Strategic Cloud Management at SAP:
→ “We have a very long-lasting partnership and a very strong partnership together with Google Cloud. What I'm really excited about is the deep co-engineering relationship that our two companies have with our engineering teams working together in bringing out new leading innovations for our customers.”
→ “My team and the Google team worked together on a daily basis doing cloud migration planning. We built a robust and effective capacity management process, [so] we really have the infrastructure that is needed. One example that always sticks out [was] the migration of 5,000 Ariba customers to Google Cloud. That was a massive success that happened in 17 hours.”
→ “We are using a very broad variety of Google Cloud products. To put that a bit into context, we have more than 60,000 virtual machines in various flavors, running on Google Cloud at the moment. We have 50,000 storage buckets live and about 150 million BigQuery tables that we are looking in.”
→ “Google Cloud is a key partner for us in providing leading gen AI technology to our customers. Already today, our customers can use Google Vertex AI and Gemini via the Business Technology Platform (BTP) platform. Overall, our multidimensional partnership is providing our customers with the combined strength of both companies.”
Google Cloud products used: BigQuery, Vertex AI, Gemini, Compute Engine
Learn more:
→ SAP on Google Cloud: https://goo.gle/3ZXxB1q
→ SAP and Google Cloud are helping businesses accelerate digital transformations and optimize value from business-critical data: https://goo.gle/40n6G0A
→ SAP partners with Google Cloud to bring AI to Datasphere: https://goo.gle/40nJqQb
→ Customers turn their SAP data into business innovation with AI-Powered analytics on Google Cloud: https://goo.gle/4247VDk