00:19:26 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:19:26] S0: Yeah. I completely agree with you. And I think in the beginning, many leaders went all in on AI. There were so many questions, and I will cautiously suggest that many were distracted by obsessing over exactly which model they should be using. And, thankfully, that conversation is evolving now, and it was refreshing to see a video of you. I think it was on your LinkedIn feed a few months ago where you said enterprise AI needs more day... More than just data and models. It was great to hear you saying that. But on that side of things, we are talking about all things in the SAP ecosystem now. Can you expand on how the SAP Business Data Cloud powers the contextualized and reasoned layer of SAP Business AI platform to give agents that deeper understanding of how a business actually runs?
00:20:15 · Irfan Khan
[00:20:15] S1: I'm glad you asked that question because I was very eager to maybe address that, and thank you for asking the question so directly. You know, we have, at SAP, been custodians for customers, and and we're very privileged to have this ownership of core business processes and core operational systems for decades. Independent of whatever the innovations and there are many coming out of the Frontier Labs, we recognize that the transactional core is this transactional core of most organizations. So if we take a look at the evolution that's going on, they want to be able to contextualize that data and be able to use that in meaningful AI outcomes. Hence, the BDC introduction we contextualize now. What we're able to do is use BDC as a primary ingest of both SAP and non SAP data, which has now been supplemented with our latest acquired company called Dremio with the Dremio Lakehouse, which now means that you can actually go from zero copy share with any of the data platform or or or hyperscaler environments. That's a great value add if you're a Databricks customer, you're a Snowflake customer. You can continue to interoperate zero copy share within those environments. But now with also with the advent of Dremio, if a customer wants to bring their own data lake, they have an iceberg native, lakehouse that they built, and they wanna be able to allow federation or sequel analytical kind of workloads across those datasets without having to consolidate and move all the data. This is now where BDC has even an additional dynamic now. It allows us to interoperate both on the open side of storage, which is iceberg, and also on the catalog side, which is Polaris, right, which is a strong sort of driver of the standardization as a technical catalog across our industry now. So that's one area. And when now you talk about contextualizing data, if you have that infra kind of foundation where you can ingest data SAP, non SAP, represent that data as primary data products, and then now bring in the Raltio piece, right, which is another key element, and have the means of being able to unify data. Imagine you've got something like a call center. Call center is very, very complex because it spans multiple environments, SAP, non SAP.
00:22:19 · Irfan Khan, Neil C. Hughes
And one of the key deliveries that we have, around about 50 unified data products is what we're targeting for the end of the year, and a good example of that would be cost center where maybe the cost center lives across SAP, Salesforce, and maybe even Snowflake. And to have one single unified data product that has the context of a cost center semantically enriched... Now imagine that your AI and your accuracy through AI, if you can ask a question, a natural language question, in our case, using Dual, and you know that fundamentally there's going to be a high degree of accuracy. This is exactly where Business Data Cloud now contextualizes, allows the data to be reasoned with, and allows it to be served up directly through that Dual engagement layer, whether that's with dual work or dual studio, which we're looking to, of course, announce at TechEd and and giving customers a huge level of productivity gains from from that one end to end sort of foundation now. [00:23:13] S0: Well, we've covered so much in a short amount of time today, and I would love to include links to everything that we've discussed. So people listening can go straight over to techtalksnetwork.com. There'll be a blog post associated with this episode. I'll include all the links that I can find from everything you've mentioned. But, anyway, you'd like me to, point everyone listening?
00:23:13 · Neil C. Hughes, Irfan Khan
[00:23:13] S0: Well, we've covered so much in a short amount of time today, and I would love to include links to everything that we've discussed. So people listening can go straight over to techtalksnetwork.com. There'll be a blog post associated with this episode. I'll include all the links that I can find from everything you've mentioned. But, anyway, you'd like me to, point everyone listening? [00:23:32] S1: Yeah. I mean, Business AI Platform for SAP is now the new umbrella, Uber sort of categorization of of those three terms, the build, the govern, and all the way through the contextualizing, of course, and reasoning. And and I would strongly advise our listeners to take a look at that and you'll get that sort of end to end experience. And in each of these discrete areas, there's a ton of innovation work going on. I've not even covered off all the things because there's so much. I mean, on the HANA Cloud side, for example, we have this agent memory, which is there for long term persistency. So as agents run and they wanna preserve context, you can manage that context across multiple instances or or duration of the of the agent invocations. So there's a lot that we're doing, and I think that the TechEd news and announcements that we've just shared will also pave the way for broader levels of adoption for SAP and non SAP workloads running in the customer's environment. So we're super happy and at the same time, excited to see where we're at right now.
00:23:32 · Irfan Khan, Neil C. Hughes
[00:23:32] S1: Yeah. I mean, Business AI Platform for SAP is now the new umbrella, Uber sort of categorization of of those three terms, the build, the govern, and all the way through the contextualizing, of course, and reasoning. And and I would strongly advise our listeners to take a look at that and you'll get that sort of end to end experience. And in each of these discrete areas, there's a ton of innovation work going on. I've not even covered off all the things because there's so much. I mean, on the HANA Cloud side, for example, we have this agent memory, which is there for long term persistency. So as agents run and they wanna preserve context, you can manage that context across multiple instances or or duration of the of the agent invocations. So there's a lot that we're doing, and I think that the TechEd news and announcements that we've just shared will also pave the way for broader levels of adoption for SAP and non SAP workloads running in the customer's environment. So we're super happy and at the same time, excited to see where we're at right now. [00:24:26] S0: I think the last time we spoke was something like two years ago, and it's phenomenal the amount of change that we've seen in that time. So we've gotta make a promise we won't leave it that long before we talk again because I think that pace of change is only gonna continue to ramp up. But more than anything, thank you for coming back on, talking about all this in a language everyone can understand and give people actionable takeaways. Really appreciate your time as always.
00:24:26 · Neil C. Hughes, Irfan Khan
[00:24:26] S0: I think the last time we spoke was something like two years ago, and it's phenomenal the amount of change that we've seen in that time. So we've gotta make a promise we won't leave it that long before we talk again because I think that pace of change is only gonna continue to ramp up. But more than anything, thank you for coming back on, talking about all this in a language everyone can understand and give people actionable takeaways. Really appreciate your time as always. [00:24:49] S1: It's a pleasure, Neil, and absolutely won't be two years until the next time we can... I I can assure you that.