The number of steps involved in deploying a piece of software to production can be significant depending on the project. IT professionals have to set up the infrastructure on which the application will run, customize the application for their company’s requirements and train employees how to use it. Along the way, they must add cybersecurity guardrails to prevent data breaches. The checklist grows even longer when the application being deployed includes generative AI features. This complexity is the reason that consulting services are a standard component of many enterprise software deals. 

At SAP’s recently concluded SAP Sapphire conference, the ERP provider and its partners introduced new professional services designed to streamline the software rollout workflow for joint customers. The goal is to ease the task of deploying SAP’s cloud-based applications and their embedded AI features. The software maker is also upgrading those embedded AI features through a new collaboration with Google Cloud.

Expanded support

Organizations that buy SAP’s software receive access to a customer support service called SAP Enterprise Support. Besides troubleshooting assistance, the offering also includes training materials and certain other components. At Sapphire, the company announced plans to fold SAP Enterprise Support into a new professional service that will expand the current feature set.

The new service will have three tiers. The first, the Foundational tier, is an expanded version of SAP Enterprise Support that will be included in every cloud product purchase. SAP’s support teams will help customers with, among other tasks, turning on the Joule AI assistant that ships with the company’s software. Joule speeds up tasks such as finding business data and processing sales orders. 

SAP’s new support offering also includes two other tiers. The Advanced tier will provide customers with access to more AI-related technical assistance, as well as help with optimizing SAP environments. It’s set to be joined by a top-end support plan called Max. Companies that purchase it can ask SAP to help them plan an AI strategy and prototype AI workflows.

Many consultancies provide services that can likewise help firms deploy AI software atop SAP deployments. With that in mind, Boardroom Insight reached out to the ERP vendor for more information about the competitive implications of the new support offering. The company described the offering as complementary to the partner-provided services on the market. 

“SAP and its partners put customers first, full stop,” an SAP spokesperson told Boardroom Insight. “The new customer engagement model was carefully constructed with three tiers, providing customers options to best fit their needs. Our partners uphold the same high standards and SLAs, and our new plans complement services that are already in place. We show up as one with customers, any potential overlaps will be properly addressed without changes or gaps in service and support.”

Giving high-growth firms a hand 

One of the partner-delivered offerings spotlighted at Sapphire was ADVANCE, a new professional services bundle that Accenture will provide in collaboration with SAP. It’s designed to help companies adopt SAP Business Suite. This is a product bundle that includes the tech giant’s flagship ERP system and four software-as-a-service applications. Enterprises can use it to store customer data, manage their supply chains and perform a range of other tasks.

ADVANCE is geared towards high-growth firms with up to $5 billion in annual revenue. “ADVANCE is tailored to the specific needs of this segment, providing packaged, right-sized solutions that are quicker and more cost-effective to implement,” Accenture senior managing director Caspar Borggreve, the global lead of the firm’s SAP Business Group, told Boardroom Insight. “This is made possible by the adoption of industry and function leading practices based on Accenture’s IP, rather than more bespoke and customized solutions.”

“Organizations of this size often have more limited budgets and don’t have the diversity of talent required to implement best of breed SaaS solutions,” Borggreve explained. “ADVANCE is for companies that prioritize ease of integration, agility and ease of use — all provided by SAP Public Cloud and the SAP Business Suite end to end SaaS solutions — over customizations. It provides organizations with a more rapid pathway to cloud ERP and industry-relevant solutions to support their growth and business transformation goals.”

Accenture estimates that ADVANCE engagements can be completed in as little as 6-12 months. Those engagements will be carried out by new dedicated teams within the consultancy’s SAP business. “We are investing in a dedicated practice of sales and SAP-certified SaaS professionals for ADVANCE,” Borggreve said. “The practice will work closely with SAP product specialists to deliver lean, rapid, and industrialized packaged offerings that combine SAP software and Accenture services to deliver at speed.”

Cloud providers join the fray 

Accenture is also involved in another software-related initiative that was announced at Sapphire. The firm is among the first participants in the AWS & SAP AI Co-Innovation Program, a new go-to-market collaboration between Amazon Web Services and SAP. Its goal is to help professional services partners build AI software for customers. The emphasis is on applications that interact with SAP deployments and use AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock, the cloud provider’s managed foundation model platform.

Partners that join the program will gain access to technical experts from both tech firms. On the financial side, they will receive funding for the development of proof-of-concept deployments. According to AWS and SAP, the program is also set to extend beyond the proof-of-concept stage of AI projects. Partners will help clients with tasks such as equipping LLM-powered applications with cybersecurity monitoring mechanisms and other components needed for production use. 

“SAP will align the solution use cases to ensure they are complementary to SAP’s products before partners co-develop these solutions, and AWS will work with partners and SAP to co-sell offerings,” an AWS spokesperson told Boardroom Insight.

Google Cloud was also present at SAP Sapphire. A spokesperson for the cloud provider said that it’s bringing Gemini 2.5 Pro, its most advanced LLM, to a component of SAP’s software portfolio called the Generative AI Hub. The integration is designed to enhance the capabilities of Joule.

SAP uses the Joule brand for two offerings. The first is the AI assistant that is embedded into many of its applications and helps users with tasks such as finding business data. The other offering, Joule Agents, was introduced in February. It uses AI agents to perform more complicated tasks that involve multiple steps, such as generating a request for proposal based on a company’s internal best practices. Google and SAP say that Gemini 2.5 Pro will make Joule-powered agents better at automating manual work.

Gemini 2.5 Pro made its debut in March. A few weeks before SAP Sapphire, the search giant released a new version of the model with enhanced capabilities. One of the additions is a feature called thought summaries. It provides information on the thought process through which Gemini 2.5 Pro generates responses, which is important for enterprise use cases that require the ability to verify the accuracy of AI output.

Google Cloud provides 10 SAP BTP regions that can be used to run SAP workloads on its infrastructure. A few weeks before Sapphire, the company introduced new M4 virtual machines optimized to run HANA, the in-memory database that underpins many SAP applications. The VMs can be provisioned with up to 224 vCPUs and 6 TB of RAM. Companies operating multiple M4 VMs can deploy them in close proximity to one another inside a Google data center using a feature called compact placement policies. That allows the VMs to communicate with less latency, which boosts response times for end-users.

Photo courtesy of SAP

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