Machine learning is not just a strategy, it’s now core to business survival, according to an April study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit. But while companies understand the importance of digital transformation, an SAP Center for Business Insight and Oxford Economics study on digital transformation showed only 3 percent have actually completed the process. And a Couchbase Inc. research survey had nine of 10 companies admitting to failures in their attempts at digital transformation.

“The good news is we’re working with SAP, and they have the data scientists, they know how SAP apps work, they know how the integration works, they know the workflows of their customers, so they’re building the models and then making it available as a service,” said Jim McHugh (pictured), vice president and general manager of Nvidia Corp.

McHugh spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, during the SAP Sapphire Now event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed how Nvidia is powering enterprise application software company SAP SE’s Leonardo Machine Learning service, making new technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, more powerful and easier to consume. (* Disclosure below.)

Making the enterprise intelligent

“Streamlining our business processes, making it happen so much faster and more efficient makes businesses more efficient. … It’s better for the company; it’s better for the employees as well,” McHugh said, citing SAP’s Leonardo as an instance of leveraging AI to streamline operations. “What [Leonardo is] doing is it’s automating a lot of the standard processes that people did.”

What types of tasks? Closing end of quarter invoices can be done instantaneously, for instance, creating a continuous close, according to McHugh, and service tickets automated so that when the customer service representative starts interacting with the customer they already have a lot of information about them and solving the issue is already well underway.

Powering Leonardo are Nvidia’s DGX systems, built on the Nvidia Volta GPU computing platform. DGX is designed to aid data scientists in AI training. “AI, it’s a new way of writing software. … You’re using data to train the software. We don’t put programmers in a room anymore and let them code for nine months and out pops software. … The data scientist is training [the AI],” McHugh said. “DGX-1 takes an incredible amount of data that helps us train these neural networks, and it’s fast, and it has an insatiable desire for data.”

Discussing the creation of an AI reference architecture for NetApp Inc.’s A800 all-flash storage array and the Nvidia DGX-1 GPU server system, McHugh said: “What we’ve worked with NetApp is actually pool together reference architecture so that when a data scientist, who is a very valuable resource, is working on this, [they are] ensured that the infrastructures are going to work together seamlessly and deliver that data to the training process.”

Here’s the complete video interview, and there’s more coverage of the SAP Sapphire Now event on theCUBE. (* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored theCUBE’s coverage of SAP Sapphire Now. Neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE