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.
Now that you know why SAP introduced SAP BTP, let’s look at what SAP BTP really is. Simply put, SAP BTP is a unified and open platform that combines several capabilities on one business-centric public cloud platform. It’s a portfolio of SAP solutions, products, and services that are brought under one umbrella. It’s a collection of on-premise and cloud products and solutions grouped under five integrated pillars: application development, automation, integration, data and analytics, and AI (see figure below). You can think of this grouping as SAP BTP capability clusters or capability pillars.
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
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
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
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
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
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. Part III of the book dives deep into use cases to help you fully understand how SAP BTP provides a unified, business-centric, and open data and development platform for the entire SAP ecosystem.
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.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP Business Technology Platform by Smitha Banda, Shibaji Chandra, and Chun Aun Gooi.
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