SAP adds AI and integrated analytics in latest cloud release

SAP is about as traditional a legacy vendor as you are likely to find, delivering complex on-prem ERP solutions for the largest organizations on the planet. But like everyone else, SAP sees a future in which companies rely less on software installed in private data centers and more on public cloud products to handle the heavy lifting for them. And SAP S/4HANA, the company's public cloud product is designed to address that. While the product was released at the end of 2015, the company is announcing some key updates to the cloud product this week that include some artificial intelligence and machine learning underpinnings, as well as an integrated analytics package to take advantage of the increased intelligence. The idea is to provide more automated insight into the company data being collected by the ERP system.