SAP leads in the cloud-based enterprise artificial intelligence platform market, along with IBM, according to new research from GlobalData.
The new report, titled “Cloud-based Enterprise AI Platforms: Competitive Landscape Assessment,” found that SAP and IBM offer a full suite of AI capabilities and features, function and industry-specific tools, and portfolios that include complementary offers, such as professional services to help customers identify and implement use cases.
SAP’s leading position is based on its full set of offerings that include application program interfaces (APIs), operationalized services, toolkits, libraries and processing power, which IBM also offers but other companies don’t. GlobalData’s evaluation of SAP puts the company ahead of giants including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce.
“AI deployments range in complexity depending on the details of a particular project or use case,” stated Rena Bhattacharyya, research director at GlobalData. “Cloud-based enterprise AI platforms consist of tools and resources that allow enterprises to incorporate cognitive functions into their applications and business processes more easily and quickly.”
Potential use cases for the suite of capabilities SAP provides are vast, according to GlobalData, and include deployments that improve efficiency and productivity, facilitate better and faster decision-making, uncover relationships in large data sets, and provide more personal, contextualized customer interactions. In addition to horizontal applications, such as those that manage sentiment, monitor security or perform sales-related projections, AI is also making its way into industry-specific applications, such as reviewing loan documentation in finance departments.
GlobalData found that the market is flooded with companies that offer AI-infused solutions or provide AI-centric tools, but few competitors provide as complete a platform as SAP and IBM. GlobalData’s report is aimed at helping organizations select vendors to assist them with leveraging AI technology, whether they are looking for pre-built solutions for non-AI specialists or integrated toolkits and libraries for data scientists.
“Companies of all sizes are exploring options for incorporating artificial intelligence into their business processes,” Bhattacharyya added. “AI platforms allow non-data scientists to incorporate AI features into their solutions quickly, and streamline deployment and management of custom machine learning or deep learning models. Enterprise AI platforms provide an integrated environment that facilitates the development of AI solutions for a range of audiences. Pre-built solutions are more readily accessible to non-AI specialists, and integrated toolkits, libraries, and resources help streamline deployments for data scientists.”
