AWS has announced a significant partnership with Sumitomo Corporation, a global trading and investment conglomerate operating in 66 countries with 900 companies under its umbrella. The Tokyo-headquartered company aims to leverage AWS’s expertise in SAP digital transformation services to upgrade its operations.
Sumitomo has initiated a multiyear project to migrate its SAP environments to AWS using RISE with SAP. The migration will encompass 16 mission-critical systems, including sales and accounting, which will be moved to the cloud and modernized by SAP S/4HANA on AWS.
In addition to its cloud migration, Sumitomo plans to utilize SAP’s Business Technology Platform to establish seamless data connectivity across its global operations. This will enable Sumitomo to integrate valuable business data with advanced analytics and AWS machine learning services, leading to enhanced customer interactions and optimized internal processes.
Sumitomo and AWS have been collaborating since 2017 to accelerate Sumitomo’s digital transformation. As part of its journey to the cloud, Sumitomo plans to leverage generative AI in its businesses. AWS’s GenAI capabilities, including Amazon Bedrock, a fully-managed service that offers foundational models via an API, will be instrumental in driving productivity and discovering innovative ways to serve customers.
AWS machine learning will play a pivotal role in Sumitomo’s drive for sustainability. By leveraging AWS’s machine learning capabilities, Sumitomo aims to create applications that accurately measure blue carbon, which refers to the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its storage in marine and coastal ecosystems.
These applications will help organizations in Japan reduce their carbon footprints and earn carbon credits. A notable example is Sumitomo’s product Nileworks, designed to assist local governments in Japan to measure blue carbon using aerial photographs taken by drones from its subsidiary. The data collected from these photographs will enable towns to apply for blue carbon credits and finance new sustainability initiatives.
Meanwhile, Sumitomo subsidiary InsightEdge uses the Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth service to label raw data, such as images, text files and videos, which is crucial for analyzing marine seagrass and seaweed to determine the amount of blue carbon present.
