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SAP will let customers on its older systems use its AI without an upgrade, The Register reported. It named no price.

SAP will let customers still on ECC, the older version of its business software that companies run on their own servers, use the company's AI tools without first moving to its new cloud system, The Register reported.

ERP LEADERS news desk · · First reported by The Register · Edition no. 60

The vendor said its Business Data Cloud will natively support Apache Iceberg, an open table format that lets different tools read the same stored data.

Gartner senior director analyst Aaron Rosenbaum said the shift moves the vendor "from a very closed application storage model to an open lakehouse model," referring to a single store that serves both reporting and AI.

The setup supports zero-copy data sharing across Databricks, Snowflake, Google, AWS and Microsoft platforms, letting tools read the data where it sits instead of each keeping its own copy, according to the release.

Until now, getting AI onto business data was tied to an upgrade to S/4HANA, the current version of the software that runs a company's finance, stock and orders, a tie Rosenbaum called "a problem."

What the release leaves out is the adoption timeline. The announcement guarantees no specific date for integrating Joule, the vendor's AI assistant. The company provides no performance metric and sets no price for the access.

ERP LEADERS card: SAP will let customers on its older systems use its AI without an upgrade, The Register reported. It named no price.
The card as published on LinkedIn. Photo: Vladislav Bezrukov from Walldorf, Germany/Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0 · original

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Companies in this story
SAP

Our file on SAP

  1. 13 NovFiled later

    IT leaders are listing SAP's ERP among software they may replace, CIO reported. Gartner says most won't make the switch for years.

  2. 13 NovFiled later

    Trek says SAP online store fixes now take a day, not one to two weeks. Developers still approve every AI change.

  3. 13 NovFiled later

    SAP now shows emissions for selected cloud products, based on its servers. It still calls its spend-based estimate the reporting reference.

  4. 12 NovFiled later

    SAP is building seven AI agent families to help upgrade customer code. Its ABAP chief said ABAP changes are usually not undone.

  5. 12 NovFiled later

    SAP says Joule AI, used by 110,000 staff, brought 20% gains. Bloomberg reported SAP has not shown how it measured them.

All 144 SAP stories

For your next steering committee

Questions for your own programme. They are not findings about any company in this story.

  1. 1Ask which AI tools already touch your ERP or finance data, including the ones nobody approved.
  2. 2Ask what each tool is allowed to change, and who reviews what it changed.
  3. 3Ask how the result is measured, and who decides to switch a tool off.

Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01

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