SAPPHIRE NOW took place on June 5-7 in Orlando with impressive numbers: more than 21,000 attendees from 102 different countries and 1,275 lectures, which was the SAP's main global event at the year. It was 3 days of much learning, where I had an opportunity to attend lectures, several demonstrations of products and applications, and meet interesting people. At the opening keynote of the event, called "The Next Move", SAP CEO Bill McDermott made the main announcements: the launch of SAP C/4 Hana and the SAP HANA Data Management Suite, the importance of SAP Leonardo, and also defined and listed what he considered the 10 main characteristics of an intelligent enterprise. McDermott commented on the importance of artificial intelligence to drive economic growth through the use of machines and the judgment of humans. "Great moments are born from great opportunities."

SAP is embracing new technologies that enable integration between its apps and existing client software and future client goals. SAP today at a 2018 Sapphire Now ASUG Annual Conference announced several initiatives that collectively are intended to make advanced technologies such as conversational user interfaces, blockchain databases, and machine learning algorithms more accessible. In addition, SAP to help foster integration between its software and applications developed by internal IT teams or third-party vendors also announced it will make 150 connectors available using an application programming interfaces (API) platform developed by Cloud Elements. SAP as part of that integration effort also announced that SAP Cloud Platform, the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment it makes available based on code developed by The Cloud Foundry Foundation, is now generally available on both Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. SAP Cloud Platform is already available on AWS.

This year's SAP SAPPHIRE conference was not an occasion of major announcements. When you have such a wide and deep installed base, the last thing you want to do is blindside your clients. But with the clock ticking on the sunset of standard support for SAP Business Suite -- currently eight years and counting -- SAP chairman Hasso Plattner claims that its replacement, S/4HANA, is now essentially feature-complete. Like Oracle, SAP is also promoting cloud as the logical destination for new adoption and for new features is going cloud-first. But that's where the similarities end.

SAP co-founder and chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board professor Hasso Plattner has praised the work Apple has done when it comes to voice recognition, touting Siri as the benchmark his company should strive towards. Speaking with journalists at Sapphire Now in Orlando on Wednesday, Plattner admitted that SAP started a little bit late in diving into artificial intelligence (AI). "We have thrown all of the resources we have into machine learning for the next foreseeable future to get as many projects going in order to have an impact," he said, hoping to make up for lost time. "The Googles have been driving for I don't know how many years in the Bay Area -- and all the other ones. AI was there 25 years ago, but it was not fast enough for our type of applications and was outside the system, but now we can apply AI inside the system."

As SAP continues to makes its own transition into the cloud, the company is also focused on delivering applications that will help customers make that same change simpler. At this year's recently held SAP Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Florida, a key theme for the company was introducing machine learning to its HANA cloud platform. CEO Bill McDermott predicted that over the next five to 10 years the hype will be around machine learning, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality. "I think very strongly that intelligent applications will fundamentally change the way you do work in the enterprise and the way you collaborate with your trading partners outside of the enterprise," McDermott said. He went on to say that machine learning has the capabilities to help businesses make more informed decisions around how they can better serve their end-customer.