GCP – In an AI era, forge a path to enduring business innovation with Google Cloud and SAP

Google Cloud and SAP believe the cloud should offer more than highly secure, high-performing, and reliable infrastructure. It should also provide a comprehensive, open, and multi-cloud platform that enables your business to get the most out of its data with analytics and generative AI. This is especially applicable for critical data stored on SAP systems, which span supply chains, finance, HR, and more. 

By integrating Google Cloud’s generative AI and analytics solutions with SAP data, our partnership helps your organization unlock the full potential of its information to drive continuous innovation, tackle your toughest business challenges, and make smarter decisions.

At today’s SAP Sapphire conference, we’re excited to announce new advancements across AI and infrastructure to help SAP customers innovate and more effectively manage data, including:

An AI-powered solution to enable more resilient supply chains. The solution combines Google Cloud Cortex Framework and Gemini models with SAP Joule and Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for Supply Planning.

An integrated analytics offering with SAP Datasphere, now available on Google Cloud Marketplace.

The introduction of Google Cloud’s memory-optimized X4 instances, which provide the largest SAP certified compute instances in the cloud market, supporting up to 32TB SAP HANA workloads.

Regional expansions for RISE with SAP, SAP BTP, and SAP Datasphere, plus support for EU access for RISE.

Multiple Gemini updates that enable SAP users to bring more gen AI capabilities to SAP workloads and access Google Cloud’s large language models through SAP GenAI Hub.

Accelerating AI-powered resilient supply chains

As we continue to co-innovate with SAP, we are diving deeper into business-critical use cases that will help customers gain a competitive edge. Using our combined data and AI solutions to strengthen supply chain management and mitigate supply chain risks is a natural fit. 

By integrating Cortex Framework and Gemini models with SAP’s generative AI assistant Joule and Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for Supply Planning, businesses can accelerate insights from sensed events, risks, and identify opportunities to enable faster, more intelligent supply chain responses.

With an AI-powered resilient supply chain, you can also help better predict demand and mitigate supply chain risk, with use cases that include: 

Enhanced demand forecasting that integrates diverse data sources, such as marketing campaigns.

Mitigation of supply chain risks with proactive disruption detection and alerts, fueled by additional data sources such as weather, and event data.

Optimized operations with more precise planning, the ability to maintain optimal inventory levels, and opportunities for automation.

SAP Datasphere now available on Google Cloud Marketplace

The SAP Datasphere integration with BigQuery continues to deliver real-time access to your SAP and non-SAP data, including publicly available datasets within BigQuery and other integrated data like Google Ads, accelerated via Cortex Framework. SAP Datasphere’s Replication Flow now offers bidirectional replication and federation with BigQuery, enabling a petabyte-scale platform for analytics and data science, as well as a foundation for machine learning and gen AI using Vertex AI with Gemini. All of this is available “out of the box” with SAP Datasphere for Google Cloud, which is available on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Customers have already generated great results through Datasphere for Google Cloud, such as a major consumer electronics company that modernized its sales reporting process. Using Datasphere, BigQuery, and Google Dataform for sales pipeline automation, they built a real-time sales reporting dashboard to replace their existing PDF reports and modernize their entire reporting process. As a result, they have saved significant resources, increased operational speed, and created deeper business insights about business sales. 

Introducing X4: Largest cloud instances with unparalleled performance, reliability, and security 

As more global enterprises migrate to SAP S/4HANA on the cloud, the demand for more memory- and compute-intensive machines to handle giant workloads keeps growing. We are thrilled to introduce the X4 machine family, featuring 16TB, 24TB, and 32TB instances designed specifically for SAP HANA OLTP and OLAP workloads to operate with highest performance and reliability, X4 family leads the industry in multiple dimensions including: 

First SAP HANA-certified 32TB instances

Offering 1920 vCPUs, more than double the number of vCPUs of other certified hyperscaler offerings and providing industry-leading compute and Hyperdisk block storage performance (up to 10,000 MBps throughput), which is enabled by Google Cloud’s unique Titanium off-load technology.

 Backed by 99.95% Compute Engine Memory-Optimized Single Instance SLA, highest in the industry, the X4 Instance family ensures exceptional reliability for SAP workloads. 

These systems further benefit from Google Cloud’s infrastructure differentiators, including the largest network footprint delivering low-latency for SAP workloads and robust security measures such as built-in encryption and proactive threat detection.

“In the past few years, our SAP HANA systems have seen significant data growth with an increasing need for higher performance,” says Shawn Lund, US Chief Technology Officer, Deloitte. “With the 24TB X4 machines and Hyperdisk storage, we have been able to raise the ceiling for our future data growth and are also looking to see improvements in our performance. Added to this, Google’s X4 machines are cloud native, giving us opportunities to automate system management and operations.”

Innovating for RISE with SAP customers

The new high-performance X4 Instance family is one example of how Google Cloud continues to invest in being the most reliable and scalable cloud provider for RISE with SAP workloads. 

Lalit Patil, CTO of RISE with SAP, says, “SAP and Google Cloud have a deep co-innovation partnership, and we’re continuously launching new, differentiated solutions to benefit RISE with SAP customers. 

At SAP Sapphire, we’re excited to announce two new offerings:

New X4 Systems for SAP RISE: SAP RISE now supports Google Cloud’s latest 16, 24, and 32TB X4 systems. This co-engineered offering, which we have rigorously tested through customer POCs, will deliver the reliability and performance needed for even the largest and most demanding SAP workloads.

Enhanced Compliance for EU Customers: We’re pleased to announce availability of EU Access for RISE on Google Cloud. This addresses the regulatory and compliance requirements of our European customers.”

Direct integration into Vertex AI through SAP’s Customer Database Platform (CDP), enabling enterprises to instill predictability into business operations, improve customer experiences, and accelerate growth.

Gemini Assist for SAP, a feature within Google Cloud Workload Manager (WLM) that enables SAP admins to operate SAP deployments through a natural-language interface.

Availability of Google Gemini LLMs in SAP GenAI Hub to support embedded generative AI features alongside SAP Joule across SAP’s product portfolio. Google Cloud models can enhance workloads including S/4, Ariba, SuccessFactors, and more. SAP customers will continue to have access to Google Cloud’s latest models as they are released, including Gemini Flash which was announced at Google I/O in May. 

A recent RISE with SAP customer on Google Cloud is Asian Paints. “We selected Google Cloud for RISE with SAP given their strong partnerships with SAP and their ability to manage large installations in the region,” says Aashish Kshetry, CIO, Asian Paints. “We look forward to deploying SAP S/4HANA on their latest infrastructure and platforms on Google Cloud to support our business innovations and sustained growth.” 

Other recent updates that solidify Google Cloud’s position as the ideal cloud partner for RISE with SAP customers include:

The expansion of the SAP BTP and Datasphere footprint, with new regions launching in Israel and Japan this quarter and in Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Brazil later this year. 

The extension of the ABAP SDK for Google Cloud to SAP BTP. This makes Google Cloud the first hyperscaler to release a fully supported version of ABAP SDK on SAP BTP, which helps customers infuse their SAP business processes with AI, analytics, and automation via 55 Google Cloud APIs (e.g., Vertex AI, BigQuery, pub/sub and more). 

Enabling customer success with large workload 

Cintas, a facilities services and supplier company that serves more than one million businesses worldwide, transformed its on-premises SAP estate with more than 200 servers and large uncompressed 130TB+ database with Google Cloud. After a lift-and-shift migration, including a RISE with SAP use case for one business unit, Cintas was able to reduce its uncompressed database to just 41TB, a 68% decrease in overhead. With a stable, fast cloud-native data management platform, the company is set to accelerate its AI and analytics journey with Google Cloud technologies like Google Cloud Cortex Framework.

Mumbai-based Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. brought its multinational federation of 80 businesses together with one instance of the private edition of SAP S/4HANA Cloud with the first-ever RISE scale-out architecture. The company worked closely with Google Cloud and SAP experts to create the flexible distributed HANA database it needed for peak workload and realized 12% faster response times. Mahindra & Mahindra has also increased developer productivity by 35% and improved high-compute transactions by 15%. In one example, its new systems withstood the demand of selling more than 100,000 cars in just 30 minutes. 

Learn more on-site at Sapphire

We’re eager to learn about your plans and challenges, and to share how our continued co-innovations with SAP leverage our combined strengths to help you meet the future with confidence with optimized SAP environments on Google Cloud, including RISE.

We’re also looking forward to the SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) Roadmap Session at Sapphire. SAP will announce exciting new SAC-BigQuery integration capabilities designed to help customers elevate planning and analysis with insights into non-SAP and unstructured data via SAC.

Visit us at Sapphire Orlando in booth #302 to meet with us in person, ask any questions you may have, or check out our demos on AI/ML, generative AI (Gemini), supply chain, sustainability, and more. Or visit https://cloud.google.com/solutions/sap to learn more immediately.