This summer, we’re pulling back the curtain on one of the most important shifts happening in enterprise SAP right now — the move from reactive operations to a fully autonomous foundation. It’s a journey we know well, and over the next several weeks, we’re going to show you exactly how to make it.
But first, let’s talk about why it matters.
It’s 2 AM. Your pager goes off. Bleary-eyed, you grab your phone, wander over to your laptop, and start logging into systems trying to piece together what broke and why. By the time you’ve traced the issue, briefed the C-suite, and gotten the business back up and running, it’s 7 AM — just in time for the kids to wake up for school.
That scenario is exactly what the Avantra Summer Innovation Series is designed to help you leave behind.
We spent time at Sapphire this year, and what we saw in that keynote changed how we think about the next three years in this industry.
SAP laid out a vision for a business AI platform that’s genuinely breathtaking — agentic workflows running directly inside ERP, natural language as the user interface, data left where it lives and accessed across SAP and non-SAP systems alike.
SAP’s CEO Christian Klein didn’t say “this works 80% of the time.” He said it has to work 99-plus percent of the time. Because when the end user of your ERP is an AI agent executing a business process, near-enough isn’t good enough.
Here’s what we kept thinking through all of it: what’s the foundation that makes this actually work?
Welcome to the Avantra Summer Innovation Series. Catch the on-demand webinar here.
Over the next several weeks, SAP market analyst Jim Dugger and Brenton O’Callaghan, Chief Product Officer at Avantra, are pulling back the curtain on what it takes to get there. Not the vision, the work. Because you can put all the agents you want on top of your landscape, but if the system is down or inaccessible, the process isn’t running.
The journey to the autonomous enterprise starts beneath the surface. It starts with your foundation.
Three principles. One direction.
Brenton put it simply in our first conversation for this series, and it’s worth sitting with. There are three things every operations team needs to be focused on right now:
- Anticipate the unexpected. Stop waiting for problems to announce themselves. Your systems should be watching, predicting, and flagging issues before they become outages — without a human logging in at midnight to do it.
- Automate the mundane. Every manual task your Basis team handles on a routine basis — system health checks, patch cycles, user creation in sandbox environments — those need to come off their plate. Not because those people aren’t valuable. Because they are, and their time shouldn’t be spent on work a platform can do autonomously.
- Accelerate the journey. Once your foundation is observed and automated, you’re not just keeping the lights on. You’re building a platform your business can actually run on. That’s when ECC customers can start experiencing the agentic future SAP announced at Sapphire. That’s when Rise migrations stop being derailed by day-to-day firefighting. That’s when the transformation timeline you pitched to leadership actually holds.
Why this matters right now
The Sapphire announcements didn’t create this challenge but they raised the stakes. If your foundation isn’t solid, all of that agentic capability SAP is building is potential energy sitting on an unstable floor. Autonomy amplifies the foundation. A fragile core doesn’t just slow you down, it also means you automate fragility.
Here’s the concrete reality: Unplanned downtime costs the Global 2000 an estimated $400 billion a year — and that’s before you factor in what a failed agentic workflow costs your business. SAP made clear at Sapphire that this isn’t just for greenfield S/4HANA Cloud customers. ECC customers, Rise customers, hybrid customers — there’s a path for all of them. That’s a good thing. But it also means the operations teams running those landscapes are about to be asked to support something far more demanding than a traditional ERP workload. Agents don’t have patience for slow systems. Business processes running on natural language commands don’t recover gracefully from unexpected downtime.
Your operations foundation needs to be ready before that load arrives.
What’s coming in the Avantra Summer Innovation Series
In the first webinar, Jim and Brenton go deep on what happened at Sapphire and what it actually means for the ops teams who have to make it work.
They talk about BTP as the connective tissue for the business AI platform, why Cloud ALM is more important than ever, and what it looks like to move from reactive monitoring to genuine operational autonomy.
As the series develops, Jim Dugger will be joined by other SAP experts, such as our Chief Technology Officer, Jan Karstens. They’ll also give you a first look at Avantra Air — our AI-based root cause analyzer that went GA at Sapphire and is already showing a 60% reduction in mean time to resolution in early customer results. That means a 10-hour outage becomes a 4-hour outage. Or better: a 2 AM page that gets resolved by 2:30, instead of 7 AM. The foundation isn’t glamorous. But it’s the thing that makes everything else possible.
The Avantra Summer Innovation Series runs through the summer, with Jim Dugger, Brenton O’Callaghan and Jan Karstens exploring the technical and strategic journey from reactive SAP operations to the autonomous enterprise. Each session builds on the last. Start here.