FIS Group: Pioneering Trusted AI Solutions for SAP Workloads with SUSE AI

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), enterprises are increasingly seeking solutions that balance innovation with security and compliance. FIS Group, a leading SAP® Gold Partner in Germany, has risen to this challenge by leveraging the robust capabilities of SUSE AI. This blog post explores how FIS Group is transforming the use AI, ensuring that these solutions are not only powerful but also trustworthy and compliant.

The Challenge of Balancing Innovation and Security

Manuel Sammeth, Managing Director of FIS-ASP GmbH, highlights a common dilemma faced by enterprises: the need for short development cycles and the expectation of high-quality, secure services. “On the one hand, customers expect rapid innovation, but on the other hand, they count on the proven quality of an enterprise service provider. SUSE AI helps us meet both expectations,” he explains.

Meeting High-Security and Compliance Requirements

Many of FIS Group’s clients operate in highly regulated industries, making data privacy and compliance paramount. These clients often avoid outsourcing their SAP environments to the public cloud due to privacy concerns. Instead, they opt for FIS Group’s protected data centers in Germany, where AI applications can run securely and in compliance with data privacy regulations.

SUSE AI, integrated with SUSE Security, ensures the entire lifecycle of AI applications is secure, from development to deployment to production. It protects sensitive data, provides a secure runtime environment for containerized AI workloads, and monitors communication between services and components. For instance, FIS Group can prevent large language models (LLMs) from being tampered with through prompt injection, thereby safeguarding sensitive information such as passwords and credit card data.

Building Ethical and Trustworthy AI

FIS Group is committed to building AI solutions that are not only secure but also ethical. Guardrails, a key feature of SUSE AI, play a crucial role in this. These security and control mechanisms ensure that AI models act reliably, ethically, and in compliance with rules, such as avoiding discriminatory answers.

SUSE AI enables guardrails technology through the Guardrails AI open source project, allowing organizations to build customized policies and checks directly into their AI workflows. This ensures that the output is aligned with user intent and maintains the highest ethical standards.

Real-World Use Cases

FIS Group has already implemented several AI solutions for its clients. One notable example is an application for a retail company that can identify different types of tiles in photos. A user uploads a photo of a hotel bathroom, and the solution automatically searches the retailer’s product catalog for the tiles depicted. This application, powered by advanced data vectorization technology, achieves a very high recognition rate and can be seamlessly integrated into the customer’s SAP application.

Other use cases include:

• Intelligent Invoice Processing: Automatically assigns incoming documents to the responsible persons and workflows within the SAP system.
• Smart Chatbots: For support and knowledge management.
• Master Data Cleansing and Product Categorization: Ensures data accuracy and consistency.
• Intelligent Recommendation Engine: Analyzes user behavior in real time and provides personalized recommendations.

The Impact of SUSE AI

SUSE AI’s integrated orchestration, monitoring, and lifecycle management tools have significantly reduced the complexity of operating AI workloads for FIS Group. “A major advantage of SUSE AI is that it significantly reduces the complexity of operating AI workloads. For example, we can manage different large language models via a central platform and implement new models for our customers very quickly when needed,” says Sammeth.

The platform’s cloud-native, extensible architecture, tightly integrated with SUSE Virtualization, SUSE Edge, and SUSE Storage, enables the flexibility to scale as customer needs grow. Whether additional Kubernetes clusters, hyperconverged infrastructure for virtual machines, or more storage capacity is required, FIS Group can quickly allocate the necessary resources.

Real-Time Visibility and Cost Efficiency

SUSE Observability in SUSE AI provides real-time monitoring, analysis, and optimization of AI workloads without requiring changes to the application code. It offers detailed insights into the status of models, data, systems, and GPUs, and tracks key metrics such as token usage and LLM performance. Predefined dashboards present data on cost, performance, and resource utilization, which is crucial for managing large AI models in production.

“This information allows us to identify performance bottlenecks early and take corrective action before the performance or availability of our AI applications is impacted,” Sammeth notes. “The insights provided by AI observability are also valuable for analyzing anomalies and investigating security incidents. Finally, the solution gives us complete visibility into token and GPU usage, which is important for accurately allocating service costs.”

Future Initiatives

FIS Group sees significant potential for AI solutions in production and logistics environments, as well as in wholesale and retail. To support these use cases, the company is focusing on edge infrastructure to enable secure, real-time data processing close to the source.

“The combination of SUSE AI and SUSE Edge enables us to run containerized AI workloads securely and reliably in edge environments. This allows us to bring the benefits of AI-driven workflows to logistics centers, production lines, or retail stores with minimal latency,” Sammeth explains.

FIS Group is also exploring the use of SAP Edge Integration Cell, a locally installable runtime environment that brings the capabilities of the SAP Integration Suite to edge environments. This solution, combined with SUSE’s edge infrastructure, ensures local data processing, high levels of data security, and minimized response times while maintaining tight integration with existing SAP landscapes.

Conclusion

By adopting SUSE AI, FIS Group has not only accelerated the development and deployment of AI applications but has also ensured that these solutions meet the strict data privacy and compliance requirements of its clients. The platform’s robust security, observability, and scalability features make it an ideal choice for enterprises looking to innovate in secure private AI environments.

For more information on how SUSE can help you become an innovation hero, visit SUSE.com & read the FIS & SUSE Success Story.