One of the more complex IT environments to operate daily involves enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. The real challenge is that most of the tasks that need to be accomplished are fairly routine. There are lots of them, but like most IT tasks, it’s not too long before a consistent pattern emerges. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is now applying an artificial intelligence (AI) platform it has developed to identify patterns that can then be used to automate IT operations tasks involving SAP applications.
Akhilesh Tripathi, vice president and head of global sales for software products at TCS, says ignio for SAP ERP eliminates the complexity associated with SAP Basis Management by providing access to virtual experts that can be used to automatically resolve common issues that regularly occur. The goal, says Tripathi, is to reduce the number of IT professionals required to manage SAP ERP applications at scale.
In addition to helping to auto-tune an SAP ERP application, Tripathi says ignio for SAP can also identify and predict issues before they occur.
“It provides end-to-end visibility across the entire environment,” says Tripathi.
Employing AI to automate the management of ERP applications will obviously go a long way to reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of ERP applications, not to mention consulting fees.
Tripathi says TCS will further extend ignio into other application environments as a logical extension of the core platform. While that platform may not yet be able to do everything a seasoned IT professional can do today, it has two core advantages. As it gets exposed to more data, it continues to learn. Secondly, whatever it does learn it never forgets or takes with it after deciding to go to work for a new employer.
It’s not clear to what degree SAP itself intends to automate the management of SAP applications. But in the meantime, that scale of what can be accomplished using AI today is already beyond what many IT professionals ever imagined being possible.
