The Traditional Model: Customer-Managed
Historically, Joule and its surrounding capabilities have been provisioned and operated by the customer on SAP BAIP. Teams create and manage sub-accounts, activate services, maintain integrations, and carry the operational overhead of running the environment. This model remains fully supported and is appropriate for many landscapes.
The New Direction: SAP-Managed
SAP increasingly delivers a SAP-managed runtime. Custom agents, apps, and workflows built in Joule Studio deploy to a fully managed SAP runtime with lifecycle management, observability, and native connectivity built in – removing infrastructure management and operational burden. The SAP AI Agent Hub governs agents centrally, and the agentic runtime enforces controls at execution. In short, customers increasingly consume the platform rather than operate the plumbing.
A Choice, Not a Forced Migration
This is a direction of travel, not a cut-over. Customer-managed environments such as SAP Build remain fully supported, a hybrid model (customer-managed plus the SAP-managed Joule Studio runtime) is supported, and organizations can transition at their own pace as their needs evolve.
What Stays in the Customer’s Responsibility
Even as SAP manages more of the runtime, key responsibilities remain with the organization and its Enterprise Architects: a consistent identity foundation (SAP Cloud Identity Services), the right entitlements and AI Unit consumption, data governance and clean-core discipline, and the adoption, change management, and value realization that turn capabilities into outcomes.
What this means for Enterprise Architects
The EA’s focus shifts from building and running the plumbing toward governing, integrating, and realizing value: choosing where the SAP-managed runtime is the right fit, keeping extensions clean-core compliant, ensuring agents are discoverable and governed in the SAP AI Agent Hub, and aligning the Joule Work experience with how people actually work. (See "The Joule Family" in Unit 1 for the underlying vocabulary of Joule, Joule Work, Joule Assistants, and Joule Agents.)
Lesson Summary
This lesson explained how the Joule operating model is shifting from a customer-managed model – where organizations provision and operate the environment on SAP BAIP – toward an SAP-managed runtime that removes operational overhead while SAP governs the full agent lifecycle. It emphasized that this is a choice and a coexistence model rather than a forced migration, clarified what remains the customer’s responsibility, and described how the Enterprise Architect’s role shifts from operating infrastructure toward governance, integration, and value realization.