John ‘JG’ Chirapurath Explains Why He Left Microsoft to Join SAP

… extend them. Maybe they want to add a chief human resources officer (CHRO) by SuccessFactors and want to extend it with feature x, y, and z, maybe an employee recognition module. You want to empower the CHRO, or somebody in that function, so the business user is increasingly becoming a software developer, where they can essentially develop it quickly. This is not to take away from the code-first environment, because the other thing that you heard us do was take some of this low-code, no-code functionality and add it into things like SAP Business Application Studio, where code-first developers can also utilize it to quickly and easily get things done.

CF: How important is the expansion of the free tier? Is that just a promotional move?

JC: I happen to think that SAP’s free tier is the most generous and the most comprehensive today in the industry. What we’re really saying is it’s open to anyone, as in it’s open to you, it’s open to me, it’s open to a larger enterprise and a smaller enterprise.

CF: What is available with the free tier?

JC: You can build things in the free tier and use anything that’s available today as part of the platform, BTP. You can play with extensions, integration, AI and data analytics. And if it’s just an experimentation, you can tear it down. But if you want to graduate it into production, you can also easily do that; it’s extremely flexible. And we want to make learning as easy as possible, so we made all of the learning journeys related to BTP completely free.

CF: Besides the free tier for developers, what are the other key TechEd announcements?

JC: We emphasized AI-centricity. I learned in my past life that AI is certainly a high art. And the power of AI is when you can flow it into applications and embed it inside applications. There are all these complicated machine learning models and documented extraction techniques that are difficult to make any use of. We are making that as easy as possible. Anchoring that is our SAP Process Automation story, which brings together workflow and robotic process automation to automate some of the most common paths that an enterprise might face.

CF: Could you describe a practical example?

JC: My favorite example is invoice processing. In most enterprises, sometimes invoices come as a screenshot. Sometimes it’s a picture taken on a phone. Sometimes it is a Word document, sometimes a PDF. You can use SAP Process Automation to scan something and have it know that this is actually an invoice, turn that into a consistent format and send it over to the invoice management system. We are making it easier to automate tasks using AI in the back end.

CF: What did SAP announce along the lines of accelerating cloud migration?

JC: We announced a set of use cases and technologies that allow our customers to …