Plus, there’s a new reward program to encourage enterprises using S/4HANA Cloud private edition to avoid customizing the core of their ERP system, adding extensions on BTP instead. Until now maintaining a “clean core” was considered its own reward, with benefits including easier annual upgrades and simplified system maintenance, but now SAP is offering to reward enterprises with additional credits for BTP usage.
Much of SAP’s focus now is on helping enterprises incorporate gen AI into their enterprise applications, drawing on the ability of LLMs to summarize, synthesize, or generate content.
Vector database
LLMs alone can only answer questions about the data they were trained on — and because the training process is relatively slow and costly, this can’t be kept up to date. They can, however, be enhanced by prompting them with relevant real-time data.
The challenge is obtaining that relevant information from an enterprise’s database, as classical database engines respond with records that are an exact match for a keyword, while relevant information may only match a broad concept — documents might refer to a product enhancement or improvement rather than an upgrade, for example. The solution for gen AI application designers is to use a database optimized for vector search, where a vector is a series of numbers describing the data along different dimensions.
SAP’s other big announcement is it’s enhancing HANA Cloud, the database engine that underpins its S/4HANA ERP system and many of its other applications, to support vector storage and search for unstructured data.
“It takes any kind of business data and embeds that onto a multidimensional vector,” said Jürgen Müller, SAP executive board member for technology and innovation. “This helps put things close together if they are similar.”
This means enterprises building gen AI applications on SAP’s platform can use HANA Cloud to embed relevant up-to-date business information into the prompts they send to LLMs.
“Many companies have their most important data in HANA Cloud already, so they don’t need to deploy a separate vector database for these capabilities,” he said.
Access to HANA Cloud’s vector search won’t be limited to those building on SAP applications; the database is available in all three main hyperscalers’ clouds, and the company said its new gen AI hub enables developers to access a range of LLMs from different providers.
Release of the vector search enhancements, like many of the other new products and features unveiled at TechEd 2023, is planned for Q1 2024.
