Describing SAP BTP Basics

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to describe what SAP BTP is and how it benefits organizations.

Introduction to the Lesson: Describing SAP BTP

For a solution architect, SAP BTP is not just a product; it's a strategic toolkit and a foundational platform for digital transformation and innovation, especially within an SAP-centric landscape. It provides the essential building blocks to design and orchestrate solutions that extend, integrate, and analyze processes without disrupting the core ERP system.

This lesson contains the following topics:

What are winning organizations looking to achieve?
What's holding them back?
What do they need?
SAP Business Suite & SAP BTP
Pillars of SAP BTP
SAP BTP in Multi-Cloud Environments

Describing SAP BTP

What Are Winning Organizations Looking to Achieve?

As we begin our deep dive into SAP BTP it is useful to take a moment to ponder a simple but important question. If SAP BTP is a solution (which it is) then what is the "problem" that SAP BTP is solving? To answer that question we look at the challenges facing businesses today. While these challenges take many forms three are particularly relevant:

Business change
Technological change
Landscape complexity

Business Change

Business now operate in a world where they must adjust constantly to external factors that affect how they do business. Several years ago for example the pandemic scrambled supply chains in a way rarely seen before. More recently tariffs for have become a factor that companies must consider both in their manufacturing and sales processes. Legal and regulatory changes which can happen at anytime and which can have different effects across different countries that businesses operate in also must be factored in.

Technological Change

Technological change is a constant today. Whether it's the transformation from traditional on-premise to cloud based development and deployment models or in-memory databases or advancements in AI businesses must constantly evaluate and adjust to these technological innovations.

Lansdcape Complexity

Somewhat related to the first two is the complexity of landscapes. A world where business processes and the techology landscape must be constantly evaluated and adjusted can lead to a complex system landscape. Hybrid environments composed of both on-premise and cloud systems are the norm. Increasing developer productivity through the integration of AI has become an urgent priority for IT departments.

To survive and thrive in the face of these challenges business must be agile. The technological infrastructure must be able to be adjusted to fit new circumstances and key applications and business processes must be able to be adjusted quickly to meet changing business needs. Only this way can organizations innovate in order to maintain competitiveness, drive growth, and ensure long-term success.

What’s Holding Them Back?

The primary reason businesses struggle with becoming an agile organization is "technical debt". Technical debt as defined by Ward Cunningham in 1992 is:""Shipping first-time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. Objects make the cost of this transaction tolerable. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.""

Put simply technical debt is where technical decisions are made based on a short term focus instead of a long term one. Over time this leads to an inflexibility that hinders organizations from implementing future technological advances and thus hinders their agility and competitiveness.

What Do They Need?

Having looked at what organizations want to achieve and what's holding them back the next logical question is what to they need? The answer is simple. To unleash agility and unlock innovation, organizations are looking to integrate and streamline their applications and processes levering the right blend of technologies and best practices. They are looking to adopt the right technologies all working together so that they have what they need and when they need it to uncover innovative use cases and creative ways to differentiate their businesses. The solution isn't just "better" or "reworked" code but the use of the latest technologies spanning for example applications, automation, integration, data and AI.

SAP Business Suite & SAP BTP

The solution to what businesses need to address these modern challenges and eliminate technical debt is SAP Business Suite along with SAP BTP. Looking at the picture above you will see the "SAP Business Suite". It's the part of the picture above "Business Technology Platform" starting with "Business Data Cloud" continuing with "Cloud ERP" and the various line of business applications such as "Spend management" and "Human capital management" finishing at the very top with "Joule Agents orchestrating end-to-end business processes". The SAP Business Suite represents the future of enterprise management - a fully integrated modular set of solutions designed to seamlessly connect and optimize every function across a business enterprise. With SAP Business Suite, businesses can scale, innovate and deliver exceptional value fast and easy. More specifically SAP Business Suite integrates applications, data and AI in one unified system creating a continuous value cycle. More specifically:

Applications: SAP’s applications and Business Technology Platform deliver comprehensive, connected and tailored solutions to meet your unique needs across finance, HR, supply chain and more
Data: SAP Business Data Cloud harmonizes data from SAP and non-SAP systems, transforming it into a centralized, semantically enriched layer to fuel advanced analytics and AI capabilities
AI: SAP Business AI is embedded seamlessly into SAP’s applications, enabling the use of intelligent, collaborative agents through Joule, our AI agent ‘orchestrator’.

SAP BTP ("Business Technology Platform") comprises the rest of the graphic. SAP BTP is the platform that brings together application development, automation, data management, analytics and planning, integration, and AI capabilities into one unified environment optimized for SAP applications. It is a comprehensive platform allowing organizations to:

Integrate and automate both SAP and non-SAP applications and processes to accelerate business outcomes.
Extend and personalize business applications to differentiate their business and create customized, personalized experiences
Reduce application development effort, and accelerate time to value with thousands of pre-built content artifacts
Build business-relevant apps and reliable AI solutions quickly with data grounded in business context

SAP BTP Sub Solution Areas

SAP BTP is centered around five pillars:

Application Development & Automation
Data and Analytics
Integration
Artificial Intelligence
Platform Foundation

Application Development & Automation

The application development and automation pillar of SAP BTP is built on capabilities that allow organizations to build new innovative apps and workspaces, extend and personalize business applications, and automate their business with drag-and-drop simplicity. The primary solution enabling this capability is SAP Build, a business application development and automation solution with a comprehensive suite of low-code, pro-code, and generative AI tools. Key features of SAP Build capabilities are:

SAP Build Work Zone - Setting up business sites
SAP Build Process Automation - Automate processes
SAP Build Apps - Building apps and extensions without code
SAP Build Code - Building apps and extensions using pro code techniques based on the ABAP Cloud and the Cloud Application Programming Models.

In addition to the above features SAP Build supports "bringing it all together" by having integrated fusion development functionality.

Data and Analytics

The data and analytic pillar of SAP BTP allow organizations to unlock the value of their business data by tapping into a harmonized and unified data foundation. The solutions that make up the backbone of this pillar are:

SAP HANA Cloud - The de facto "Database as a Service" (DBaaS) and persistency for SAP Applications and intelligent data applications
SAP Business Data Cloud - Out-of-the-box, always-on data products following a harmonized data model, reducing time to value by providing scalable access to data without duplication
SAP Master Data Governance - Consolidated and consistent master data for flawless business transactions and trustworthy enterprise analytics.

Integration

This tier allows organizations to connect and streamline applications and processes across the entire enterprise. The primary solution in this area is SAP Integration Suite which offers one unified integration platform for the integration of business processes, APIs and events across SAP and non-SAP applications. With SAP Integration Suite customers can connect and automate the integration of all their applications and processes throughout their heterogenous & hybrid enterprise environment consisting of SAP and non-SAP applications, in the cloud as well as in their private landscapes. A few of the components of SAP Integration Suite and their capabilities are:

Cloud Integration - Connect and automate all your applications and processes
API Management - Efficiently manage and secure APIs
SAP Event Mesh - Adopt an event-driven architecture to distribute events in real time for seamless integration within hybrid environments.

Artificial Intelligence

By infusing AI into applications across the enterprise, companies can drive innovation and differentiation using data with context. The artificial intelligence solutions of SAP BTP allow organizations to both build tailored AI solutions unique to their business and also to infuse AI into applications. AI Foundation is a comprehensive set of reusable services and AI capabilities for AI developers on SAP BTP composed of the following:

AI Services - Ready to use AI services such as Tabular Data Processing, Document Processing and Text Processing
AI Lifecycle Management - Development tools such as SAP AI Core, SAP AI Launchpad and Generative AI hub
Business Data & Context - Grounding AI on contextualized data by utilizing capabilities such as SAP HANA Vector Engine and SAP Knowledge Graph Engine

SAP BTP's AI capabilities allow businesses to leverage cutting-edge technology while maintaining control over their data and processes. This approach ensures that AI solutions are not only powerful but also aligned with specific business objectives and industry requirements

Platform Foundation

This final pillar is comprised of services that act as the stable foundation to enable companies to easily start, establish and work with the different platform components and their individual developments on top. Similar to an engine room that ensures everything runs smoothly, securely, and efficiently, SAP BTP platform foundation provides the essential services that empower application development, data management, integration, and AI – all within the same environment. The platform foundation is centered around 5 key areas:

Runtimes & Application Lifecycle Management - Runtimes such as SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry Runtime, SAP BTP, Kyma Runtime and SAP BTP, ABAP Environment
Security & Compliance - Capabilities such as authentication, single sign on, data security and privacy and audit logging
Persistency - SAP HANA Cloud as the the optimal foundation for all your applications, data and AI scenarios
Connectivity - seamless, secure connectivity across hybrid IT landscapes, integrating public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise systems and applications.
Administration & Operations - comprehensive administration and operations tools for enterprise management, including account control, entitlements, and centralized automation.

These platform services form the backbone of SAP BTP and they ease the design, development and implementation of companies different use cases encompassing the development of simple application extensions, complex AI-enabled applications, data scenarios or operating an enterprise-wide integration platform.

Watch the video above to summarize the pillars of SAP BTP.

SAP BTP in Multi-Cloud and Multi-Platform Environments

SAP BTP operates as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. This means that SAP BTP provides everything that allows developers to create, test, run, and deploy applications and for administrators to handle user and application maintenance and administration. More specifically SAP BTP provides infrastructure (i.e., servers, storage, and networking) and platform (i.e., middleware, development tools, database management systems, business intelligence, etc.) to support the application development and maintenance lifecycle. This enables organizations to focus on the aforementioned development and innovation without worrying about infrastructure management.

Key to SAP BTP is its "Multi-Cloud" strategy which relies on two pillars:

The leveraging of hyperscalers global reach and scalable infrastructures
The leveraging of partner services in conjunction with SAP BTP services

In a nutshell Multi-Cloud equals choice.

The advantages of this approach are:

Organizations benefit from the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of their choice of infrastructure provider
Organizations can consume hyperscaler services in combination with SAP BTP services to build solutions customized for them
Organizations can co-locate compute hyperscaler services and SAP BTP services close to end users, to achieve optimal performance, minimal latency, and to meet regional regulations

Summary

In summary, SAP BTP offers a solution architect a cohesive and powerful platform to design, build, and run modern enterprise solutions. It provides the tools to solve real-world problems around extensibility, integration, and data analytics while adhering to the best-practice principle of a Clean Core.

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