SAP Machine Learning is being introduced to make its business applications more intelligent and empower its ecosystem to build machine learning (ML) applications for customers. Spanning its own solutions, partner programs and educational offerings, these programs will help accelerate ML adoption across SAP’s global customer base. This announcement was made at the SAP TechEd conference, being held November 8-10, 2016, in Barcelona.
First, SAP has unveiled new intelligent business applications. A new solution, “brand intelligence,” is supposed to analyze brand exposure in video and images by leveraging deep learning. It will be released as beta by the end of Q1 2017 and plans to help advertisers gain accurate, real-time insights into sponsoring and advertising ROI. The SAP® Innovation Center Network developed this application, using SAP’s new machine learning platform that the company plans to open to partners and developers next year. The brand intelligence solution will join several other applications already created on the machine learning platform. These other machine learning applications help businesses solve problems by, for example, removing bias in recruiting practices and automating the time-consuming invoice-matching process.
Second, SAP launched a new partner program for SAP Application Intelligence. This program makes it easier for customers to consume partner solutions based on ML and artificial intelligence (AI) by promoting interface certification and platform compatibility. It complements SAP’s existing partner programs. Eligible participants include SAP global services and technology partners and solution extension partners, as well as technology providers and machine learning startups.
Third, a massive open online course (MOOC), Enterprise Machine Learning in a Nutshell, will launch on openSAP on November 14. Focusing on how to leverage machine learning for business outcomes, this course is presented by Dr. Markus Noga, VP for Machine Learning at SAP, and Dr. Daniel Dahlmeier, leader of the Natural Language Processing team at SAP Innovation Center Network.
“By 2020, smart machines will be a top five investment priority for more than 30% of CIOs,” according to Gartner.*
“SAP’s vision for machine learning and artificial intelligence goes way beyond one business application. It’s about creating business value by infusing our entire set of solutions with more intelligence, and providing a platform for our employees and an ecosystem to build machine learning solutions on,” said Dr. Juergen Mueller, chief innovation officer at SAP. “Data is the fuel for machine learning. SAP systems touch more than 70 percent of the world’s business transactions. With this asset, and our deep knowledge of business processes, we are poised to create an end-to-end intelligent enterprise.”
Additional information on SAP’s machine learning solutions can be found at http://sap.com/ml.