The 5 Pillars of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP)

SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) takes SAP’s products, services, and solutions, and puts them under one roof. 

The world is changing for businesses and businesses are having to react to this change to keep up with market and customer demands. The pace at which this change is happening is also very fast, forcing companies to respond quickly. The COVID-19 pandemic has tested some organizations and companies, and it’s become very apparent that agility and adaptability are crucial.

We see that future-ready businesses achieve much higher returns, which is supported by three key competencies:

• Achieving a state of continuous digital transformation, building the muscle memory and readiness to be on the forefront of flawless business execution. Continuously evolving businesses consume standard innovation and are highly selective about building things. They infuse intelligence and automation in business processes to maximize impact. These businesses democratize innovation so that the workforce can make their own decisions and execute ideas through grassroots insights.
• Agile operating models that free up IT resources to focus on innovation and reduce the burden of maintenance and tactical execution. This is achieved by building partnerships that differentiate you from the competition by leveraging your vendors to be accountable for joint success. Overall, technology for future-fit businesses must take the role of seamlessly enabling strategy with flexibility and speed.
• Finally, in the world of unpredictability, resilience is a necessary trait for large businesses to build security, compliance, and responsiveness within all its functions. Success is dependent on automating standards, delivering compliance as a workflow with guided intuition built into points of execution, and being able to quickly adapt to change as the need arises.

As you can see in the figure below, SAP provides several applications that solve many business process challenges, but we know there will be some gaps due to the uniqueness in the way businesses are run. If you have a secret sauce, you want to incorporate it and safeguard it without disrupting anything else. This is where SAP BTP can help solve business problems that aren’t addressed by out-of-the-box SAP applications through discovery, extension applications, and analytics.

It’s clear that both business and IT have to join forces and leverage technology in a way to create differentiators in the market. To do this, organizations need a platform that provides all the necessary products and services so IT and business can quickly join forces to make necessary decisions focusing on innovation and transformation. SAP BTP is one such platform that provides the technical foundation for businesses to change and adapt quickly. As mentioned earlier, SAP BTP is the foundation for an intelligent enterprise.

It’s not a tool or a system in and of itself, but instead a collection of on-premise and cloud products that can be grouped under five pillars. In this post, we’ll dive deeper into each of the pillars that make up SAP BTP.

SAP BTP Pillars

SAP BTP encompasses various capabilities that can be categorized into five pillars: data and analytics, application development, automation, integration, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Note: SAP’s strategy will continue to evolve; the capability pillars of SAP BTP may be rearranged or changed, and products and services may be added or deleted from the portfolio. If this happens, it shouldn’t impact the value you get from SAP BTP. You’ll learn throughout this book how various SAP BTP services are brought together to build innovative solutions; the categorization of products doesn’t significantly alter how you architect and build solutions using SAP BTP services. This is because solutions can be built using SAP BTP services and technologies in any combination. You can refer to www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/solutions.html for the latest information on the market categorization of products and services within SAP BTP.

Application Development

SAP BTP supports the entire lifecycle of application development—from ideation to deployment and management. The platform offers cloud-native environments that allow for the creation of applications using modern development practices, including microservices architecture and containerization. Tools like SAP Business Application Studio help developers create applications using low-code/no-code tools, making it easier for both technical and non-technical users to design solutions. Additionally, SAP Fiori and SAPUI5 offer streamlined user interfaces that enhance the end-user experience. This pillar supports both the creation of new applications and the extension of existing SAP applications to meet specific business needs.

With most companies accelerating their digital transformations, the importance of application development has grown significantly. Recent studies have found a clear link between accelerating software innovation and company performance. Today, along with mastering the nuances of their industry, companies must also excel in developing software. Yet, many companies are still struggling to keep up.

To help companies innovate at the speed of their businesses, SAP provides several capabilities. A unified pro-code and low-code/no-code offering for professional and citizen developers to enable low-code application composition and digital experience to accelerate time to value. This solves challenges quickly by leveraging business expertise to reduce the burden on IT and reduce costs. Whether it’s a professional developer, citizen developer/automator or business user, with pro-code and low-code/no-code offerings, SAP enables everybody in a company with any development skills to become a champion of change.

Automation

The automation pillar of SAP BTP empowers businesses to streamline their operations and reduce manual effort. Automation tools such as SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Intelligent RPA allow for the creation of automated workflows across a variety of business processes, from HR to finance. By eliminating repetitive tasks, organizations can enhance productivity, reduce human error, and accelerate processes. Additionally, SAP’s AI capabilities can be incorporated into automation to create intelligent workflows that can adapt and evolve over time, ensuring that automation continuously supports business needs and growth.

SAP powers many of our customer’s most mission-critical processes such as quote-to-cash and hire-to-retire. Within these processes are many predictable, mundane, and repetitive tasks. By automating routine tasks, organizations can execute faster, reduce errors, and free up people to work on more meaningful projects. SAP Build Process Automation combines workflow management to help create forms, manage decision logic, and build, adapt, and organize process flows with simple drag-and-drop functionalities. Robotic process automation (RPA) automates human tasks that can be attended or unattended so people can support the task or have it run handsfree. This is all possible with a no-code frontend business users can use themselves or with the support of IT. Prebuilt content and connectors for SAP and non-SAP solutions help you get started quickly.

Integration

SAP BTP's integration capabilities ensure seamless connectivity between different applications, both within and outside of the SAP ecosystem. SAP Integration Suite provides a range of services for integrating cloud, hybrid, and on-premise applications. This suite supports API management, event-driven architecture, and data synchronization, allowing businesses to achieve unified, real-time data flows across the enterprise. By enabling systems to work together efficiently, the integration pillar helps break down silos and ensures that business processes operate smoothly across the organization.

Customer landscapes are becoming more and more diverse and complex with systems, applications, and processes running on-premise and in the cloud. SAP BTP has services that support all possible integration needs in an organization. You can seamlessly integrate SAP and non-SAP solutions both on-premise and in the cloud while securely connecting applications, processes, and people. Out-of-the-box content that includes integration packs, application programming interfaces (APIs), business events, and connectors is available and ready to use on day one. Continuous access to best practices via prepackaged SAP business content and the AI-powered Content Advisor speeds up integration and development and lowers ongoing support costs.

Data and Analytics

This pillar empowers organizations to turn data into actionable insights. SAP Datasphere enables data integration and management across heterogeneous systems, while SAP Analytics Cloud delivers advanced analytics capabilities, including predictive analytics, business intelligence, and data visualization. The combination of these tools helps organizations harness data to make informed decisions, improve operational performance, and uncover new growth opportunities. Businesses can also leverage SAP’s real-time data processing capabilities to stay agile and responsive to market changes.

While the majority of transactions in a customer’s landscape touch an SAP environment, only a fraction of the data is in SAP. The rest of the data is sitting in disconnected systems or data lakes, where it’s of low value for the customer because it’s not contextualized. SAP is aligning data models across the suite components, which allows the execution of end-to-end business processes. This aligned data model represents highly valuable pieces of data that are connected to each other and that everybody is eager to use. For this, SAP BTP provides everything you need to store, access, process, integrate, and interpret all relevant data in your landscape. The different services and products categorized under this pillar let you manage and use data in a flexible and efficient manner at the speed your business demands and enables you to get a single view of data across every aspect of the organization without having to physically move it into a single place. Data is brought together on the fly as and when it’s needed for insights, and decision-making can be achieved through analytics and planning tools.

Artificial Intelligence

SAP BTP's AI capabilities enable businesses to infuse artificial intelligence and machine learning into their processes, making them smarter and more efficient. SAP AI Core and AI Foundation provide tools to build and deploy machine learning models. These models can be integrated into business processes for use cases such as predictive maintenance, customer behavior analysis, and demand forecasting. AI-powered automation can further enhance business operations by making real-time decisions based on historical data and current conditions, allowing organizations to optimize their resources and improve customer experiences.

Intelligent technology solutions change the way we live and work by optimizing processes, maximizing resources, and igniting innovation with the right combination of AI/machine learning services and industry expertise. AI and machine learning are getting embedded into everything—both simple and complex business processes. SAP provides several features in AI. With the help of prebuilt AI models, you can realize self-learning programs and build intelligent business processes to realize your intelligent enterprise.

If you aren’t new to SAP and already have SAP in your landscape, then you most likely are already familiar with solutions that are part of one or more of the five SAP BTP technology pillars. So, what’s new? The solutions within each of the capability pillars provide value by themselves, and you must have already implemented some of them. But what you likely haven’t done is use them together or integrate them to extend reach and functionality. SAP BTP gives you the flexibility to implement one or several of the solutions as you need them today and add to the landscape as your needs grow in the future. This is typically how products and solutions have been implemented until now.

Although it’s true that these technologies and solutions can be implemented in silos, the real power of SAP BTP is when they are combined together to build new solutions, extend existing solutions, or integrate cloud and on-premise SAP and non-SAP solutions. SAP BTP gives you the flexibility of implementing products and solutions independent of one another, but once you start integrating them, you create a “better together” scenario to quickly solve some of your most challenging business problems that you might not have imagined could be solved in the past, especially when looking at one stack of the capability pillar. You’ll soon realize that combining your existing investments with new technologies will give you the power to innovate and uncover endless opportunities.

SAP BTP empowers SAP developers, partners, and customers alike.

Developers

For SAP developers, it provides a strong product portfolio and a central platform for accelerating development and integration.

Partners

SAP partners can leverage the tools and services that help accelerate development and integration in a more efficient way, reducing time to value and reducing implementation costs. They can build extensions to existing SAP solutions that can be made available to customers to buy in the SAP Store. The common architecture and open framework help to reduce time to market.

Customers

SAP customers can start with implementing one product and then add more to the landscape, building on their core processes, leveraging their existing long-term investments, or plugging in new business and technology innovations. They can rapidly build, integrate, and extend applications or consume content made available by partners.

Companies are operating in a complex hybrid landscape of on-premise and cloud systems. They are interacting with suppliers, vendors, partners, and customers, while running their own unique business logic, processes, and data models. Connecting all these business applications, processes, and data is important for companies to do business seamlessly and efficiently. SAP BTP lets you integrate, create value from data, and extend the SAP landscapes, as depicted in this figure.

Let’s dive deeper into these capabilities.

Integration: Connect Applications, Data, and Processes

Most companies have diverse landscapes with systems, applications, and users spanning cloud and on-premise environments. They are interacting with external entities as well. It’s natural for companies to want to look for efficient and cost-effective ways to connect these systems and landscapes across their environments, improve operational efficiencies, and grow their business. SAP BTP is useful in connecting applications, data, and processes by providing ways to deliver a unified user experience. The platform enables real-time data exchange across multiple cloud and on-premise systems, integrating applications across vendors, legacy systems, hyperscaler platforms, and open-source technologies. It provides prebuilt integration content and connectors to integrate to various SAP and non-SAP systems and processes.

Data-to-Value: Drive Confident Data-Driven Decisions

Data in the 21st century is like oil in the 18th century: it’s the most valuable resource of the digital economy. Companies have started collecting data from various sources such as sensor data, customer data, experience data, and more. As the data volumes are growing year after year, companies are struggling to make use of data and create significant business value. Companies need to not only process, harmonize, manage, protect, and access all the new data but also relate it to traditional operational data. They need to be able to consolidate data in ways that doesn’t impact existing operations while still gaining real-time, reliable insights to aid in making critical business decisions. SAP BTP has products and services that support every data need of a company. It helps companies gain a consolidated view across all data assets, including on-premise/cloud and SAP/non-SAP, and achieve insights to make real-time decisions, especially during times of rapid change.

Extensibility: Build and Extend Applications and Processes

Companies are having to keep up with changing market demands and emerging business models and technology. Businesses need to adapt quickly by adopting new technology and processes and by refining existing ones. With SAP BTP, you can build, extend, and enhance SAP applications based on business needs without disrupting the existing operations. You can build personalized applications to improve user productivity and meet customer, employee, or partner needs. Application lifecycle management (ALM) is managed through the framework, reducing operations costs. Low-code and no-code tools help automate software development, and the flexibility to separate customizations from core software code decreases maintenance costs.

About The SAP Business Technology Platform Book

SAP BTP encompasses various products and services that provide flexibility and efficiency when performing business operations. To better understand what falls under the SAP BTP umbrella and the possibilities this technology suite creates for your system, we’ve published SAP Business Technology Platform.

The book opens with insight into digital transformation, intelligent enterprises, and SAP BTP’s placement among these innovations. It also breaks down each technology pillar within SAP BTP and its available products. Once you get an understanding of what SAP BTP is, you’ll learn how to set up your account.

The next part of the book discusses application architecture and design. Understand the basics of designing applications and explore the development approach phases. Learn the importance of the clean core strategy and explore implementation considerations to achieve clean extensions. Then, get an introduction to AI, user interface technologies, runtime options, and integration solutions.

You’ll also learn about analytics capabilities and the available products in SAP BTP. Then, get to know the security services for authentication and common security flows. The last chapter in this part discusses, DevOps, application development and operations, and explores the key phases of an implementation scenario.

Part III introduces you to use cases in SAP BTP. You’ll begin by learning how to identify use cases, and then see how SAP BTP harmonizes business operations. Explore how SAP BTP can be used with various solutions and technologies: SAP Ariba for managing procurement spend, SAP SuccessFactors for creating a prehire experience, SAP Concur for creating a COVID-19 risk index to improve employee safety, generative AI for automating customer interaction, SAP Cloud Application Programming Model to achieve multitenancy, SAP BTP, Kyma runtime to develop applications, and SAP Build Process Automation for automatic error handling and process transformation.

Who Is This Book For?

This book is for anyone looking for a complete overview of SAP BTP in order to get started with an implementation. Architects will get enough information from the book to help them build SAP BTP strategies, and project managers can understand the extent of effort involved in SAP BTP implementations so they can better manage SAP BTP projects.

About the Authors

Smitha Banda is a senior business development manager at SAP and leads the SAP BTP practice for North America. She started her journey at SAP in 2005 as a consultant providing advisory, architecture, and development services to customers across the globe. She has always worked closely with customers and continues to do so in her current role. She has been instrumental in building the SAP BTP practice within SAP across all regions. She works closely with the go-to-market and partner enablement teams to build services and programs to support customers’ SAP BTP needs. She and her team of SAP BTP experts, architects, developers, and consultants are involved in end-to-end SAP BTP implementations.

Shibaji Chandra is a seasoned consulting architect at SAP who has in-depth knowledge and expertise in SAP BTP. Shibaji has been working in the SAP space for more than 20 years and has extensive work experience with SAP’s cloud platforms and related services since 2013. Throughout the years, he has worked very closely with customers, provided solution architectures, and defined best practices, strategies, and methodologies. He has built several SAP BTP-based applications, and educated customers, partners, and internal SAP teams across the globe on SAP BTP-related topics.

Chun Aun Gooi is an SAP BTP architect and a developer at heart. He has more than 12 years of SAP experience in architecting, building, and enhancing enterprise software. He has been involved in a number of customer projects, built several proof of concepts for customers and reference architectures, and provided guidance and strategy to customers on various SAP BTP topics.

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