UPDATE Oct, 2019: We just added a new season with 4 new podcasts focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and data orchestration. Building a data foundation is essential to driving innovation. This is just as true for mid-market companies as for large enterprise companies. Mid-market and large enterprise companies have different challenges, so we've brought together experts from each size company to discuss key trends that are reshaping the way successful companies use their data: from data management and data foundation to spatial and machine learning to data-based process and information excellence. Listen to this chat series on all things data!

UPDATE Oct, 2019: We just added a new season with 4 new podcasts focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and data orchestration. Building a data foundation is essential to driving innovation. This is just as true for mid-market companies as for large enterprise companies. Mid-market and large enterprise companies have different challenges, so we've brought together experts from each size company to discuss key trends that are reshaping the way successful companies use their data: from data management and data foundation to spatial and machine learning to data-based process and information excellence. Listen to this chat series on all things data!

In my previous blog, we have seen how the off-the-shelf Object Detection is applied in Enterprise context in conjunction with SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation. Now we will have a close look at how to implement custom object detection with tensorflow for serving intelligent solutions, especially how to train a custom object detector with custom dataset, and provision as RESTful API running on SAP Cloud Platform, Cloud Foundry, which can be consumed by your intelligent solution through loosely-coupled HTTP(s). The TensorFlow Object Detection API is an open source framework built on top of TensorFlow that makes it easy to construct, train and deploy object detection models. For more detail, you may refer to its official document. In order to train your own object detector, you need to prepare the dataset for training, including the images with the target objects, and labelling the object in the images.

SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundational APIs have been recently made available in the trial landscape. Anyone can register for a trial account and test drive these ML APIs. In this blog, I want to quickly show you how you get started using the ML APIs to works with the pre-trained models. At SAPPHIRE, the Machine Learning team also announced a set of new pre-trained and customizable services for Face detection, Scene text recognition etc. In the blog, I would like to focus on Scene text recognition which will enable to read text from natural images/scenes.

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."

Conversational User Interfaces(CUI) are the new UIs. We are all aware of the rise of the intelligent assistants in the market and they are becoming part of our day to day conversations. We as consumers are beginning to use the same to also interact with enterprise software too – lookup for clothing trends and place an order in your favourite retail store. Analysts are predicting this to be the next biggest paradigm shift in information technology. Most of you would be aware that SAP acquired a bot building platform called Recast.AI early this year.

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.

When launching SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation, SAP started on a mission to overcome these challenges and help all customers transition to the intelligent enterprise, no matter their level of digital maturity and AI expertise. Now, SAP expands the capabilities of its machine learning platform, including the training of image classification services with training data belonging to the customer, the opportunity for customers to deploy their own models on SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation, and new ready-to-use services. To help customers and partners address a larger number of use cases, SAP has opened the enterprise-class model training capability of SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation. It is now possible for customer to tailor services to their business needs by training services on their unique data. This new functionality is enabled via a secure extraction of data via SAP Cloud Platform and predefined training routines.

SAP has relaunched its Leonardo platform as a "digital innovation system", as it seeks to allow customers to take advantage of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, advanced analytics and blockchain on top of their business data. SAP Leonardo was originally released in January as an IoT platform, giving customers a place to track sensor data from connected assets and start to gain insight quickly. Now SAP wants to give customers a simple way to embrace all of these emerging technologies to solve specific business problems, before packaging them up for non-early adopters to procure later on. So instead of just helping customers embrace IoT with a cloud system and a set of templates, SAP has expanded Leonardo to the whole spectrum of enterprise problems. As Mike Flannagan, senior vice president of analytics at SAP put it: "Leonardo is about accelerating time to value by finding generalised, common business problems across an industry. "It's about taking a business problem, which is specific to one customer, find the elements of that problem which are common across the industry, then defining the elements of a methodology, the technologies used to solve that problem and package those up and make them available as an accelerator for the next customers" It can be tricky to find a working definition of SAP Leonardo at this point because it is an umbrella term for a number of SAP technologies, all built on top of its open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering called SAP Cloud Platform. Speaking during SAP's annual Sapphire event in Orlando, Florida this week, cofounder and chairman of the SAP supervisory board Dr Hasso Plattner called Leonardo a "bounding box" which sits around "a set of objects.

SAP has added machine learning to its Leonardo IoT software suite to help businesses handle data gathered from smart devices more intelligently. It unveiled the additions to Leonardo -- and a cloud of other news -- at its customer conference, Sapphire Now, in Orlando on Tuesday. Leonardo runs on SAP Cloud Platform and provides a number of services to process data from the internet of things, including streaming and predictive analytics. Now, those predictive capabilities will include machine-learning tools tuned to work with the rest of the Leonardo components. "It's about adding intelligence to existing business processes and integrating with the core systems of record. Leonardo's capabilities can be infused into SAP applications," said Mike Flannagan, SAP's senior vice president for analytics.