AI, GROW with SAP, and Beyond: Top Takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2024

Each year, AWS re:Invent offers the chance for the global cloud computing community to come together and learn how AWS and its partners can work together to leverage the cloud to transform their business. This year’s event was no different, with fantastic technical sessions, keynote announcements, and a chance to discuss the technologies making an impact on businesses today.

Several members of the apiphani team attended and are sharing their top takeaways and observations from re:Invent 2024. In this blog, the team reflects on the latest AI innovations from AWS, an important development for GROW with SAP, and the latest data insights.

GenAI Innovation Takes Center Stage

AI wasn’t just a buzzword going into re:Invent – AWS showcased AI innovations in action. The cloud provider showed off its use of AI to help companies reduce time spent on mundane tasks and speed up innovation with new products and updates. AWS continues to expand its use of AI, ML, and analytics in a major way. Several AI highlights the apiphani team found particularly interesting include:

• Amazon SageMaker – Numerous updates were announced including the next generation of SageMaker. Updates include the availability of flexible training plans which allow customers to train generative AI models within their specific timeline and budget constraints. SageMaker Unified Studio provides a single tool that helps bring together end-to-end capabilities to accelerate development for analytic services, which could be particularly interesting as an application for apiphani’s data pipeline services.
• Stability AI in Bedrock – AWS unveiled an expansion to Bedrock to accelerate generative AI adoption. Through access to the Stability AI model, AWS users now have access to more than 100 specialized models providing better fits for each individual customer use case.
• Amazon Q in QuickSight – Among new capabilities announced was the new scenario analysis capability in Amazon Q in QuickSight. AWS says this feature will allow business users to perform complex scenario analysis up to 10x faster. According to AWS, “this new capability eliminates hours of tedious and error-prone manual work traditionally required to perform analyses using spreadsheets or other alternatives.” Apiphani is excited to see how these capabilities can be leveraged for data analytics, especially when it comes to cleaning up data.

Biggest Surprise at re:Invent

Sidharth Babbar, Infrastructure Manager, Security & Operations, apiphani

“I wasn’t aware Apple is using multiple AWS services. Apple’s director of ML was the guest in AWS CEO Matt Garman’s keynote, and he mentioned that Apple has used AWS chips like Amazon Graviton and Inferentia to achieve more than 40% efficiency gains in its ML inference workloads. Apple has also been evaluating Trainium 2, the latest version of the AWS AI training chip.”

GROW with SAP on AWS

Turning to one of the biggest partner announcements of the event, SAP and AWS made waves by announcing GROW with SAP in AWS Marketplace. This makes AWS the first cloud provider to offer the GROW with SAP solution through its cloud marketplace enabling customers to rapidly deploy SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution while leveraging the reliability, security and scalability of AWS.

In an SAP press release, Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product Engineering stated, “Our collaboration with AWS will provide customers of all sizes a simplified path to deploy cloud ERP with powerful automation and insights via Joule embedded across our business applications.” He went on to discuss how this development will allow customers to unlock even greater business AI innovation.

Being SAP PartnerEdge certified, and SAP Certified HANA Operations Partner, AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, and SAP Services Competency partner with AWS, the apiphani team is excited to explore how the GROW availability in AWS Marketplace can help more customers simplify their cloud ERP deployments and take advantage of new generative AI-assisted innovations. This extension of the partnership between AWS and SAP is an instant game changer for companies looking to streamline business operations.

Top AWS Partner Takeaway

Emel Gokce, Principal Director, SAP Delivery, apiphani

“It’s very clear that AWS is ahead of the game when it comes to large SAP systems.”

Discussing Data at re:Invent

Apiphani’s re:Invent attendees also noted insights that tie back to our own data pipeline services. Apiphani’s Managing Director, Service Delivery, Mike Gallo highlighted data transformation insights from SmugMug CEO and Co-Founder Don MacAskill which include the following:

• Keep as much data as possible, you need to know what may be valuable in the future and more data may lead to more insights over time.
• Don’t immediately transform – keep original data in case there are new future innovations for better transformations later.
• Include metadata – this data has value even if there are not immediate use cases now, there may be in the future.
• Make data accessible so that it’s easy for the consumer to access.
• Meet people where they are by keeping the user or consumer at the forefront.

As we know from our daily work at apiphani, the approach described above helps drive consistency and accelerates access to data by building a single data platform for the entire organization to use.

Top Data Takeaway

Mike Gallo, Managing Director, Service Delivery, apiphani

“I found Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec’s session Modern Data Patterns for Modern Data Strategies interesting. She outlined how organizations are discovering that, to unlock meaningful value from AI use cases, they must have a good data foundation to build it on. I was struck by her quote “Good data leads to good AI,” as it encapsulates one of the most important factors in getting value from AI, good data.”

Final Reflections

Entering 2025, we’re excited to see how the lessons learned from AWS re:invent 2024 can be applied at apiphani and across the industry. We look forward to further exploring these innovations and how they can help us support client’s mission-critical workloads.

Of course, this blog captures just a snapshot of the event. Check out the AWS News Blog to learn about additional news making headlines: Top Announcements of AWS re:Invent 2024. And if you’d like to further the conversation, please get in touch with the apiphani team.