HELLO 2019: SAP Talks Up the Future of AI and Converged Analytics

We caught up with the team at SAP to get their thoughts on the year ahead on the world of real-time. They took a look at a few keys areas of focus.

#1: On converged analytics

The intelligent enterprise is about dealing with the most profound aspect of success – making good decisions, quickly and with confidence. Smart capabilities not only allow for the automation of decisions – meaning humans can spend their time on more creative tasks – but also make the powerful simple and open up analytics tools to users across the business, not just the IT specialists. In 2019, businesses will realize the importance of putting analytics in the very hands of its users.

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To do this, they will look to a converged analytics strategy where business intelligence, planning, and predictive analytics are brought together to enable users to connect their business plans to their business outcomes, using just one intelligent platform to realize scenarios that cover the entire management lifecycle – from forecasts to the financial close – and most importantly from the boardroom to every employee. The future is to bring everything into one picture – one platform, all analytics, for all users. (From Gerrit Kazmaier, Senior Vice President, SAP Analytics and Database and Data Management, SAP)

#2: On AI and analytics

A new generation of intelligent apps powered by machine learning will bring together data intelligence from multiple cloud systems using sophisticated algorithms to model, simulate, and predict outcomes to provide users with recommendations. Gone will be the days of reporting, data exploration, and visualization of data.

Autonomous analytic systems will crawl your data, searching for hidden insights and provide valuable perspective insights when it’s needed and within the context of a business application workflow. Insights will be enhanced with valuable and anonymized cloud data from other cloud users and surfaced for benchmarking scenarios in the areas of people intelligence, customer intelligence, supplier and spend intelligence, and industry relevant insights. (From Nic Smith, Global VP of Marketing for Cloud Analytics, SAP)

(Editor’s Note: Where did the year go? 2019 is almost upon us, and the brightest minds in the real-time analytics space are looking forward to the new year and taking their guess at where they think this space is going. Help us expand the discussion and build out the future of real-time by joining the RTInsights Brain Trust)