In the dynamic landscape of modern business, staying competitive and agile requires the seamless integration of technology and innovation across business units, systems, and locations.
This is where SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) emerges as a game-changing solution!
As an integrated platform, the SAP Business Technology Platform revolutionizes the way organizations design, develop, deploy, and manage applications, fostering unparalleled efficiency and adaptability and improving connections across their entire workforce.
In this article, we delve into the world of SAP BTP, exploring its key components, capabilities, and the transformative potential it holds for businesses aiming to thrive in an ever-evolving technological era. We’ll also discuss how our SAP consulting services can help your internal teams manage SAP BTP operations more efficiently and optimize investments in the long run. Let’s dive in!
What is BTP in SAP?
The SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is a unified cloud platform that helps companies leverage artificial intelligence capabilities to combine data, analytics, automation, and application development in a single, unified environment.
With the SAP Business Technology Platform, organizations across industries can adopt a new cloud operations-based model on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) technologies to innovate core business operations and enhance business transformation efforts across the board.
Solutions in the SAP Business Technology Platform
Here’s a closer look at the main software development offerings included in the SAP BTP solution:
1) Extended Planning and Analysis
The Extended Planning and Analysis component allows customers to leverage advanced enterprise planning capabilities to connect all people, processes, and plans across the organization, transforming planning for core business processes and improving connections between existing SAP cloud platform brand solutions.
It also allows users to leverage trusted data to plan business processes with confidence and combine planning and analysis features to drive better, more agile decision-making across teams.
The Extended Planning and Analysis component provides a few key solutions to improve planning efficiency and accuracy, including:
Workforce Planning:
Provides integrated analytics and intelligent workforce data management capabilities to combine HR, operational, financial, and strategic plans and create a more agile workforce across the entire SAP ecosystem.
Financial Planning:
Offers an integrated solution and intelligent enterprise applications to perform instant analysis and comparison for planning and actuals in a comprehensive solution and improve profitability across the SAP cloud platform integration suite.
Sales Planning:
Leverages machine learning and AI optimization technologies to improve the effectiveness of sales quota and territory planning operations, increase attainment, and maximize revenue across the entire organization.
Supply Chain Planning:
Offers agile supply chain management functions and extended planning and analysis capabilities to synchronize supply chain planning decisions across all lines of business and improve flexibility across financial and operational supply chain plans.
2) App Development and Automation
With the Application Development and Automation component in the SAP Business Technology Platform, companies can automate core business operations and create new enterprise cloud applications more efficiently, improving the flexibility and agility of their SAP solutions in the long run.
Drag-and-drop interfaces, prebuilt workflows, and robotic process automation (RPA) bots make it easier than ever for users to facilitate more efficient application development without complex coding requirements, design more agile workspaces, and develop industry-specific content.
This component offers a few key solutions to facilitate efficient app development and management:
SAP Build:
Provides low-code solutions to facilitate more efficient application creation and augmentation, automate business processes, and improve accessibility and visualization across organizational sites.
Pro-code development:
Leverages IDE, frameworks, and tools designed with Java, Java.script, and ABAP in mind to improve pro-code development and simplify application development.
SAP Signavio:
Combines BPM and process mining to transform and optimize business processes at scale, build more resilient SAP solutions, and leverage KPIs and ready-to-use process models to make better decisions across your SAP and non-SAP systems.
3) Data Management and Analytics
The Data Management and Analytics component helps companies give data a bigger purpose across the organization and leverage SAP Data Services and other intelligent technologies to maximize the value of their SAP data and make smarter, more agile decisions over time.
It also offers improved planning and analysis capabilities to build modern data stacks, deliver more trustworthy data, and modernize the data foundation for SAP customers across industries.
This component offers a few critical solutions to improve data management across teams and systems:
SAP HANA Cloud Platform:
The SAP HANA cloud platform leverages a modern database-as-a-service (DBaaS) to drive more intelligent data analysis, deliver improved analytics capabilities at scale, and deliver trusted in-memory performance to analyze sensitive data and ensure privacy, no matter what.
SAP Datasphere:
Provides a unified service for data integration, warehousing, cataloging, and semantic modeling across SAP and non-SAP systems, driving more comprehensive access to authoritative data and simplifying the data landscape across the entire organization.
SAP Analytics Cloud:
The SAP Analytics Cloud combines analytics and planning with intelligent integrations for SAP applications to automate data-driven insights, utilize the full potential of core SAP data, and drive better, more agile decision-making across teams and systems.
SAP Data Intelligence Cloud:
Provides a solid foundation for an organization’s data architecture, making it easier to discover, access, connect, prepare, orchestrate, and optimize enterprise data assets, drive flexible data management, and facilitate better innovation and growth over time.
SAP Master Data Governance:
Offers a centralized hub for master data management and governance to improve the quality of business applications and information, establish a more cohesive data analysis strategy across teams, and reduce the total cost of ownership.
4) Artificial Intelligence
SAP BTP leverages artificial intelligence resources, like ready-to-use, industry-specific AI models and conversational AI chatbots, to transform complex business processes, improve transparency and compliance across teams, and manage end-to-end AI lifecycle management processes in one place.
It offers a few core solutions to facilitate better AI planning, integration, and agility across teams:
SAP AI Business Services:
Leverages AI models pre-trained on business-relevant data and external market data to add intelligence to existing SAP and third-party applications and extend SAP cloud platform applications flexibly and efficiently.
SAP AI Launchpad:
Allows users to manage their entire machine learning lifecycle from a centralized location, facilitates more efficient application development and integration, and connects AI use cases across multiple instances of AI runtimes in their SAP environment.
SAP AI Core:
Provides the resources needed to help users handle the execution and operation of their core AI assets, facilitate seamless integrations between SAP applications, and support full lifecycle management for business-critical AI scenarios.
5) SAP Cloud Platform Integration
With pre-built integration tools from the SAP Integration Suite in SAP Cloud BTP, organizations can automate business-wide processes and connect critical business applications, modernizing integration with simplicity and confidence and reducing the complexities of manual application development in the process.
The SAP BTP cockpit also provides a holistic approach to data integration and process management, making it easier to accelerate business outcomes, improve data transparency and integrity, and innovate at scale across heterogeneous IT landscapes.
SAP BTP resources are connected to the SAP Integration Suite to facilitate better connections between SAP solutions and leverage APIs, core connectors, and other best practices for system integration to maximize productivity and generate faster returns on investment (ROI) across teams.
Technical Environments Supported by SAP BTP Services
In the SAP BTP cockpit, environments make up the actual Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, anchored to SAP BTP on a subaccount level and driving the development and integration of business applications.
Here are a few technical environments supported by the SAP BTP:
ABAP Environment
Within the Cloud Foundry environment, users are enabled to create an ABAP environment — an area of the software designed specifically for ABAP development.
The ABAP environment makes it easier for organizations to create extensions for ABAP-based products, including applications in the SAP Cloud Platform brand like SAP S/4HANA Cloud and the SAP Business Application Studio, and develop new cloud-based applications across the entire technical landscape.
By leveraging the ABAP environment, customers can also optimize and transform ABAP-based custom code and extensions to other cloud-based technical environments and applications.
Neo Environment
With the Neo environment, organizations have the tools and resources to develop Java, HTML5, and SAP HANA extended application (SAP HANA XS) services to drive more efficient application development and integration across their SAP landscapes.
SAP customers can also leverage the SAP BTP Neo environment to manage operations in the SAP UI Development Toolkit (SAPUI5), modernize web-based application landscapes, and develop more intuitive user interfaces for improved productivity and efficiency.
Cloud Foundry Environment
The Cloud Foundry environment provides multiple different build packs, including both SAP Community innovations and self-developed build packs, to help organizations support multiple runtimes, preferred languages, services, and libraries across their entire enterprise.
It also provides advanced development tools to enable users to develop new business applications and services and facilitate better business transformation in the long run, not just business technology transformation.
Kyma Environment
The Kyma environment is based on an open-source project that allows developer customers to extend SAP cloud platform applications with serverless functions and integrate them with containerized microservices.
It is fully managed on the Kubernetes runtime, facilitating more efficient development for new cloud solutions and driving better business growth and innovation over time.
Key SAP BTP Capabilities
The SAP BTP cockpit is built on a unified cloud platform that makes it easier to consolidate data analytics, artificial intelligence, automation, application development, and integration functions in the same place.
Here are a few critical capabilities of SAP Cloud BTP for business users across industries:
Personalized SAP applications
- Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance user interactions and engagement
- Access real-time data views and improve accessibility across global accounts
- Provide stronger integrations to connect SAP and non-SAP business applications
Faster innovation
- Access, analyze, and compare data from SAP applications to derive consistent business meaning
- Leverage low-code and no-code tools to manage resources and work smarter and faster
- Facilitate more efficient projects with prebuilt use cases and other industry-specific content
Enterprise platform operations
- Deploy and manage applications in an intelligent, cloud-based SAP environment
- Customize core business processes and reduce complex maintenance requirements
- Interoperate your existing IT landscape and preferred cloud tools for improved efficiency
- Monitor application metrics across a simplified monitoring interface
How Can We Help?
Whether you need help implementing the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) for the first time, additional support navigating cloud credits in your organization’s Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement, or just an extra hand using predictive analytics to improve team decision-making, Surety Systems is here to help.
Our senior-level, US-based SAP consultant team has what it takes to handle all your SAP-related projects — big or small, simple or complex, short-term or long-term.
Getting Started with Our Team
Interested in learning more about the SAP Business Technology Platform or where our team of SAP consultants can come in to help improve and optimize core operations across your SAP solutions?
Contact us today to get started with our expert SAP consultant team!
