Google Cloud and SAP: Powering AI with enterprise data

As the 2027 end of support for SAP Business Suite 7 approaches, SAP customers need to decide where to deploy as they upgrade to cloud-based S/4HANA and RISE with SAP. This represents a great opportunity to get more value out of your enterprise data, and take advantage of the longstanding partnership between Google Cloud and SAP. RISE with SAP on Google Cloud lets you accelerate innovation and reduce costs through a secure, reliable, and scalable high-performance infrastructure. By deploying SAP on Google Cloud, you can accelerate your ERP transformation with a unique, unified data experience that offers leading integration, analytics accelerators, and AI innovations to bring clarity from data to decisions.

Two data powerhouses unite

Key to the Google Cloud-SAP partnership is the integration between BigQuery, a fully managed, AI-ready data analytics platform that helps you maximize value from your data, and SAP Datasphere. BigQuery is designed to be multi-engine, multi-format, and multi-cloud. This integration lets you access your most critical data in real time without duplication thanks to co-engineered data replication and federation technologies. This joint capability can unify data from SAP software systems, such as SAP S/4HANA and SAP HANA Cloud, providing organizations with a comprehensive view of their most important data on Google Cloud and letting you:

• Simplify data landscapes. Federate queries across SAP Datasphere and BigQuery to blend data from SAP and non-SAP software. This minimizes common data silos from sources that span marketing, sales, purchasing, finance, supply chain, manufacturing and more. 

• Improve decision-making. Gain a more holistic view of your data and leverage powerful analytics to drive better decision-making. Now, you can plan with a single, comprehensive view of your businesses by connecting SAP data to powerful data and analytics tools such as Vertex AI to analyze financial and business outcomes while improving the accuracy of models. 

• Add rich context to your analytics. BigQuery makes it easy to bring in Google and third-party data sources such as Trends, Weather, Maps, world events and Enterprise application data with Google Cloud Cortex Framework’s pre-built accelerators.

• Use SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) globally on Google Cloud. SAP is advancing its multi-cloud offerings by expanding regional support of SAP BTP and SAP HANA Cloud on Google Cloud, which includes support for SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere. SAP and Google Cloud intend to launch SAP BTP in five new regions, building to a total of eight regions supported by 2025.

Transform your business with AI

Google Cloud has powerful, easy-to-use tools to help you incorporate your SAP data into predictive and generative AI initiatives. Vertex AI provides a single, integrated development platform where you can build sophisticated predictive and generative AI agents and experiences faster — without any manual ETL.

• Innovate freely with Model Garden, a curated collection of over 150 machine learning models. Google is the only cloud provider to offer widely used first-party, third-party, and open-source models, so you can easily discover and choose foundation models based on modality, size, performance, latency, and cost. 

• Leverage Google’s most powerful model yet. Gemini is Google’s most capable and general family of LLMs, offering four models each built for its own set of use cases. Google Cloud recently announced multiple Gemini updates that enable SAP users to bring more gen AI capabilities to SAP workloads and access Google Cloud’s large language models through SAP GenAI Hub.

• Get more from your models by augmenting and grounding them with SAP data. Leverage Vertex AI Model Builder’s managed tooling for extensions, function calling, and grounding. Customize Gemini models in an efficient, lower-cost way with supervised tuning.

• Easily deploy, manage, and monitor agents with Vertex AI Agent Builder, which lets you quickly create a range of generative AI agents grounded with Google Search and your SAP data with the convenience of a no-code agent builder console. 

Run SAP today on tomorrow’s infrastructure

Google Cloud helps SAP customers build quickly, securely, and cost effectively with the next generation of infrastructure designed to meet specific workload and industry needs. Google Cloud infrastructure is optimized for AI, cloud-first, enterprise workloads with an emphasis on security, scalability, and data sovereignty. 

• Leverage superior scale-up machine types. Google Cloud is the sole provider of 32TB SAP-certified machines, simplifying architecture, deployments, and administration. More recently, Google Cloud introduced memory-optimized X4 instances, which provide the largest SAP-certified compute instances in the cloud market, supporting up to 32TB SAP HANA workloads.

• Accelerate time to value. Google Cortex for SAP Framework delivers pre-built analytical and AI models based on SAP data models and with out-of-the-box integration with SAP. Cortex comes with pre-built dashboards for visualizing SAP data and enriches data with AI/ML services and external data sets such as weather, search trends, ads impressions, and more.

• Increase agility and scalability. Unlike on-premises infrastructure, Google Cloud offers on-demand scalability to massive scale if needed, allowing you to easily adjust resources based on changing business needs. This agility can be crucial for responding to market fluctuations or unexpected growth.

• Improve performance and efficiency. Google Cloud's infrastructure is designed for high performance and reliability. This can lead to faster processing times and reduced latency for your SAP applications, improving overall efficiency and the user experience.

• A highly secure cloud. While customers are growing concerned about the recent increase in DDoS attacks, threat vulnerability, and security-born outages, Google Cloud’s customers have been appreciative of our consistency in availability. With robust security features and compliance certifications, Google Cloud can help give you peace of mind knowing your data is secure and your business meets regulatory requirements.

• Meet sustainability goals. SAP and Google Cloud are exploring ways to combine SAP Datasphere with broader ESG data sets and insights powered by Google Cloud to accelerate sustainability journeys with actionable insights.

Real-world results with RISE on Google Cloud

SAP customers are already getting more out of their technology investments by migrating to Google Cloud.

Hunkemöller
Hunkemöller, a leading European lingerie brand with over 850 stores in 22 countries, aimed to enhance its customer experience and support its omnichannel growth strategy. The company migrated its SAP environment and IT infrastructure to Google Cloud using RISE with SAP. This move allowed Hunkemöller to leverage Google Cloud's data and analytics capabilities, enabling more precise customer segmentation and personalized recommendations, leading to improved customer experiences and reduced returns. 

"By moving our on-premise data to the cloud and leveraging Google Cloud technologies, we can provide our customers with the best possible customer experience—digitally driven and supported by data. Developments happen at lightspeed in retail, and we want to be a market leader when it comes to digital applications and use of data for a better customer experience and operation of the business. We worked intensively with experts from Google Cloud and partners to realize the blueprint for cloud migration.” - Gordon Smit, Global IT Director, Hunkemöller

Cementos Pacasmayo
A leading producer of construction solutions in Northern Peru, Cementos Pacasmayo built a data ecosystem using the Cortex Framework, SAP, and Vertex AI on Google Cloud to provide stakeholders across all departments with fast, broad, and deep visibility into data. 

“Before, three people had to work for eight hours to generate a business analysis. Now business users don't have to wait for computer scientists or data analysts. They can act autonomously to immediately gain valuable insights thanks to automation and rich, centralized information.” - Franz Zárate, Technical Tribe Lead Data & Analytics, Cementos Pacasmayo 

This is just the beginning

Google Cloud and SAP continue to collaborate, with new co-innovations coming online all the time, making Google Cloud a compelling choice for your SAP modernization initiative. Together, Google Cloud and SAP have made it easy to activate your SAP data with Cloud Cortex Framework and Vertex AI. Now you can enable advanced analytics and build cutting-edge AI/ML and generative AI applications, retain end-to-end business context for enterprise AI, and improve time-to-AI enterprise realization with instant access to your SAP data, all without thousands of integration and development hours. 

Learn more about SAP on Google Cloud here.