You’ve likely heard the buzz about the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). But you’re probably wondering:
1. What is SAP BTP?
2. What does SAP BTP do?
3. How can SAP BTP benefit my business?
Read our blog to find out!
What is the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP)?
If you have a look at the websites, press releases, and blogs from SAP, you will come across this definition of SAP BTP:
“SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) brings together data and analytics, artificial intelligence, application development, automation, and integration in one, unified environment. It’s a business-centric, open platform for the entire SAP ecosystem, enabling users to integrate and create value from data and extend their SAP and third-party solution landscapes to meet evolving business needs.”
Confused? We thought so. Allow us to break down what this means.
1. It’s a unified platform…
SAP BTP is a new cloud-based platform that consolidates many different SAP solutions into a single place, so you can deploy, manage, and integrate them from a single cockpit. Some of these solutions are new (such as SAP Build) while others have been around for a long time (such as SAP Integration Suite or SAP Analytics Cloud). Considering SAP offers hundreds of different software solutions, it can be overwhelming to understand them. With BTP, SAP has consolidated many of these different solutions into a single platform to make it easier for your business to leverage the latest technology.
2. It’s business-centric…
The world is changing and businesses need to react faster to keep up with market and customer demands. As one of the leading enterprise software companies providing their solutions to thousands of customers, SAP understands the challenges faced by modern businesses. The collection of solutions provided by SAP BTP allows businesses to innovate, transform, and adapt quickly with a single platform. When it comes to BTP, the keyword is customization. BTP provides a platform and framework to customize your IT landscape to meet your unique business needs, by extending existing applications or building new ones altogether.
3. It’s an open platform…
The various solutions available in BTP can add value to your entire IT landscape, including third-party, not just SAP. Whether you are using SAP S/4HANA or Oracle NetSuite, your business can potentially use and benefit from various BTP solutions.
What does the SAP Business Technology Platform do?
Once we start to have a look at what SAP BTP does, it becomes much easier to understand. In a nutshell, we can break this down into 5 components:
- Application Development
- Automation
- Integration
- Analytics
- Artificial Intelligence
Keep reading for a breakdown of each of these components and some quick examples of how our team at Axxis Consulting has deployed these for our customers. This will give you an idea of how you can leverage them for your business.
1. Application Development
SAP BTP provides a great, simple solution for application development called SAP Build Apps (formerly known as AppGyver). SAP Build Apps is a professional application development solution designed for anyone to quickly create apps without code regardless of role or skill level, using a simple, visual interface. These apps can be web-based, and/or available on iOS and Android.
SAP Build Apps enables you to drag and drop different pre-defined components and build cloud applications without any coding. You can then connect these apps to SAP and non-SAP solutions securely with pre-built components, connectors, and integrations.
Do you want to learn more about SAP Build Apps and how you can potentially use them for your business? Check out our other blog.
If your team are already an expert developer and is looking for something more advanced, you can also leverage SAP Business Application Studio, which is also available as part of SAP BTP. This is a solution for professional developers to build applications using IDE, tools, and frameworks optimized for Java.
Quick Example: Our team at Axxis Consulting used SAP Build Apps to create a web-based customer self-service portal that integrates with a Customer Service CRM for customers to log in and create tickets, and views the updates and status of their existing tickets.
Automation
To run an efficient business, it’s important to make sure that your employees aren’t wasting time on manual tasks. SAP Build Process Automation (formerly known as SAP Robotic Process Automation, or “RPA”) in BTP can help automate manual, repetitive tasks, so your employees can focus on the things that matter. SAP Build Process Automation combines RPA functionality, workflow management, decision management, process visibility, and embedded AI capabilities into one intuitive low-code experience.
Do you want to learn more about SAP Build Process Automation and how you can potentially use it for your business? Check out our other blog.
With RPA, SAP’s friendly “robots” help you automate repetitive manual tasks such as copy-and-paste operations, data extraction, data entry, and data creation using no-code and low-code capabilities. Workflow management helps enable users to create forms, manage decision logic, and build, adapt, and organize process flows with the simplicity of drag-and-drop functionality. The built-in AI capabilities enable intelligent document processing without the need to engage a data scientist.
Quick Example: Our team at Axxis Consulting used SAP Build Process Automation to automatically read details from a picture of an identity card and populate them into a new customer registration form.
2 Integration
As companies continue to embark further on their digital transformation journeys, they find themselves using more and more applications. But, to get the full value from all of these applications, integration is the key. SAP Integration Suite in BTP helps connect and automate your business applications with integrations, connectors, APIs, and best practices for a faster ROI.
Click here for some great demos and an overview of how you can potentially use SAP Integration Suite for different business scenarios
SAP Integration Suite is an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that acts as a middleware that allows you to smoothly integrate on-premise and cloud-based applications and processes with tools and prebuilt content managed by SAP.
Quick Example: Our team at Axxis Consulting used SAP Integration Suite to integrate 12 ERP systems (both SAP and non-SAP), a marketing automation system, a survey tool, and various business warehouse systems to a single Sales CRM system to provide a global sales team with a 360-degree view of customers and sales operations.
3. Analytics
When a company is using multiple applications, they need data from various sources to understand the big picture. This can lead to disjointed reporting processes with employees downloading data from various sources and then consolidating reports in excel sheets. SAP Analytics Cloud helps you combine all of these data sources into a single system to create reports and make decisions without any doubt.
Click here to try out and experience SAP Analytics Cloud
With SAP Analytics Cloud, you can bring together analytics and planning with unique integration to SAP applications and smooth access to third-party data sources. As the analytics and planning solution within BTP, SAP Analytics Cloud supports trusted insights and integrated planning processes across your enterprise.
Quick Example: Our team at Axxis Consulting used SAP Analytics Cloud to combine ERP and CRM data in a single dashboard to help improve decision-making.
4. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the key buzzword for 2023, but at this point, you’re probably wondering how you can actually leverage it for your business in a concrete way. This is where SAP AI Business Services available on BTP come in.
SAP AI Business Services automate and optimize corporate processes by adding intelligence to your applications using AI models pre-trained on business-relevant data. Instead of having to build these AI capabilities from scratch, you can leverage pre-determined models from SAP that can help you automatically classify various objects throughout your business process.
Quick Example: Our team at Axxis Consulting used SAP AI Business Services to automatically categorize and route new service tickets in a Service CRM to speed up issue resolution.
What are the benefits of SAP Business Technology Platform?
Now that you understand what SAP BTP actually does, you can visualize how this new platform can benefit your business. The benefits will depend on how you choose to use each component of the platform, but here are some general benefits of the platform as a whole:
1. Leverage the latest, cutting-edge technology
By combining the latest technology for application development, automation, integration, analytics, and AI into a single platform, BTP makes it easier for you to leverage the best of the best to meet your business requirements and speed up your time-to-value.
2. Customize without re-inventing the wheel
SAP understands that each business has its own unique requirements and that often simple off-the-shelf solutions won’t get the job done. Whether it’s custom application integrations or developing new applications, BTP provides your business with the tools and framework to customize your IT landscape in a secure, guided way. This also helps lower your overall development costs.
3. Manage your entire IT landscape in one place
SAP BTP helps your business deploy, manage, and integrate all of your business applications from a single, unified cockpit. Deployed in a mission-critical cloud environment managed by SAP, you can rest assured that your applications will be consistently accessible with ensured data security.
