Building a Startup from the ground up is rarely easy. From funding to finding great talent, the challenges abound and this is particularity true in the enterprise software market. The level of complexity and heterogeneity in today's corporate IT landscape has never been greater yet the expectations for speed to market and software quality are at an all-time high. Integration is a key concern and priority for customers in the era of cloud computing,
Today, I am delighted to present a Q&A session with Sudipto Dasgupta, CTO and Co-Founder of Live Objects, a Silicon Valley Startup utilizing AI to optimize business processes. Sudipto will be sharing the story of Live Objects' integration journey with SAP and their collaboration with the SAP Integration and Certification Center (ICC), a team whose mission for the past 20 years has been precisely that of helping ISVs and partners tackle the challenges of software integration. Through technical enablement and integration best practices, ICC has worked with countless companies to ensure that their technology integrates seamlessly with SAP solutions, giving customers confidence in their investment decision.
Live Objects has the distinction of being one of the very first AI-related companies to have successfully achieved SAP certification for their integration with SAP Commerce, a key component of the SAP Customer Experience Suite. This enables Live Objects to showcase their solution on the SAP Certified Solutions Directory and the SAP App Center in order to position it in better light to the broader AI market which has seen tremendous growth in recent years, According to a recent report by Gartner, the number of enterprises leveraging AI exploded by 270 percent in the past four years and the market is estimated to be worth $6.14 billion by 2022.
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Hi Sudipto, please tell us about your Startup
Live Objects is a closed-loop self-optimizing business process transformation platform. The product actively generates and manages AI-driven business process customizations that meet changing performance, customer experience and risk needs from business operations. Live Objects infers gaps in business processes across business applications by mining patterns in KPIs hidden across structured sources of data like systems of record, rules, business objects & process logs, and unstructured sources like emails, contracts, chat logs and call records. The process customizations are generated by harnessing in-built domain awareness about specific process areas to continuously optimize data-driven intelligence, rules and process workflows.
What is your area of focus?
We focus on the following: generate as-is process map by mining from structured and unstructured data, generate optimized process map, close-loop by auto-deploying the recommendation. From the domain point of view we focus on E-Commerce , Finance , Order to Cash on Order Management.
How did your journey begin with SAP and why it was important for you to pursue an integration with SAP Commerce?
We started looking into the certification process with SAP at the end of last year. The need was generated by customer demand for a SAP certified solution. Since e-commerce is a key focus area for Live Objects, we chose SAP Commerce as our first integration option.
Please tell us more about your SAP certified solution and its integration with SAP Commerce?
With the current certified version for SAP Commerce, Live Objects’ solution integrates natively and delivers AI driven optimizations across digital commerce, order workflows, inventory and replenishment from supply-chain. SAP Commerce being part of the SAP C/4HANA Suite, we are delighted that Live Objects is among the first AI-related certified solutions for the SAP Customer Experience Suite.
Live Objects integrates with SAP Commerce on two fundamental aspects:
1. Connecting to SAP Commerce to fetch business entities and transaction events
2. Generate optimized domain models summarized as event logs for SAP Commerce process mining
Introduction to Live Objects (video)
How was your overall experience in developing an integration to SAP from scratch?
SAP Commerce is leading the way for customers and their digital transformation journey. The SAP Certification process proved to be very helpful for a startup company like ours to harden our solutions and build expertise on integration with SAP applications. By choosing an SAP Certified solution, customers will avoid potential unknown integration factors which could lead to slowdowns in the implementation speed. The ICC team we interacted with was very helpful and we felt the process was structured very well. There was no confusion on the action items during the process. We appreciated the support and availability of an integration advisor through out the whole process. The great thing to mention was we never felt we got lost at any point in time during the process.
Did you encounter any issues or challenges during the integration effort?
The process is well documented and kudos to the SAP Integration and Certification Center team on ensuring that we had everything in place before getting into each step on the certification process. This helped in avoiding any rework and ensuring a timely completion.
How would you compare your development and integration experience on this platform versus other platforms?
The API paradigm of SAP Commerce was very helpful in the integration. The process is well orchestrated and documented. This helped in cutting down the time compared to others. The support and assistance we received throughout the end to end process is a great way to keep communication open and help us stay on track. Certification is a great strategy to ensure you are up to date on best practices with your integration and following SAP guidelines.
What are your thoughts on how your solution can help in improving the Customer Experience?
Our solution provides a seamless enhanced experience for our e-commerce customers by removing any process bottleneck. The bottlenecks can be of time, cost, revenue leakage or customer interface. Optimizing the bottlenecks provides an improved experience to the customers.
As a startup specializing in AI, how can your solution help in delivering the Intelligent Enterprise to customers?
Live Objects uses neural net and domain ontology-based AI techniques to mine, optimize and rectify business process outliers, KPI’s and gaps. This helps us to significantly leverage SAP Commerce to unleash business process optimizations and enable the vision of intelligent enterprises for Retail, CPG & E-Commerce customers.
What’s next for Live Objects?
We plan on extending our product's integration to SAP S/4HANA as a next step in our integration journey with SAP. Instead of lift and shift migration to S4, Live Objects wants to provide a visibility and path towards optimized process flow as part of the migration process.
A big thanks to the SAP Integration and Certification Center for helping us throughout the process and guiding us step by step. This is a great example of SAP Run Simple. This type of collaboration effort helps startups like ours join the SAP ecosystem in serving customers in their digital transformation journey and become intelligent enterprises.
Thank you ! Thrilled to have been a part of it.
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This concludes our Q&A session with Live Objects. My thanks to Sudipto and his team for sharing their experience.
To learn more on how you can ease your integration with SAP products and platforms, please visit the SAP Partner Co-Innovation and Certification website.
To learn more about Live Objects:
- Company: Live Objects, Inc
- Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA
- Industry: Technology / Software
- Web Site: https://liveobjects.ai
- SAP Certified Solutions Directory listing
- SAP App Center listing
- Introduction video to Live Objects
- SAP Managed Tags:
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