Discovering Agent and Application Development

Your company utilizes various SAP software, majorly cloud-based, within your intelligent enterprise. You intend to adapt UI screens, broaden existing SAPUI5 apps with APIs, and run a personalized development app on SAP BTP. You also aim to streamline your employees' digital experience.

Further, your company encompasses numerous business processes, procedures, and tasks, with varying levels of automation. To augment the process automation and reduce manual tasks, you are considering SAP Build Process Automation. Developers and business process experts, transformed into citizen developers, can accomplish this automation.

As the market shifts towards SaaS solutions, you're unable to modify the software as with older on-premise systems. SAP even advises maintaining the core software clean in on-premise systems, promoting extensions over modifications. This necessitates adopting new methods of custom development and software portfolio extensions in your enterprise.

The app development capabilities of SAP BTP provide a portfolio of solutions that simplify the development of application extensions or custom applications. While optimized for SAP applications to augment their value, the platform is also compatible with third-party application extensions.

SAP also offers a comprehensive toolkit for both front-end and back-end developers, including professional development tools and mechanics for AI development experiences with Joule. This diverse toolset empowers you to craft a unified user experience for your end-users.

You can read more about Application Development in the SAP Help Portal and on SAP.com.

If you're aiming to automate business processes for increased agility or reduced manual effort, SAP BTP provides enterprise automation capabilities through SAP Build. SAP Build brings together workflows, robotic process automation, visual development, and AI-based agents in a unified environment.

A key component of this ecosystem is Joule, SAP's AI copilot. Beyond using standard capabilities, developers and business experts can use SAP Build to create custom Joule agents and extend business processes with Joule skills. This allows Joule to execute specific tasks and manage complex workflows across different systems, acting as an intelligent orchestrator for enterprise automation. In earlier industry discussions, this approach was often described as "hyperautomation" to highlight the combination of AI and automation. Today, SAP focuses on enterprise automation by combining process automation, AI capabilities, and autonomous agents to handle end-to-end business processes across applications and data.

With the growth of digitalization, the market for technological requirements has become volatile. Business needs are constantly changing, causing many companies to adapt quickly. To bridge the resourcing gap for technical talent, SAP provides solutions that empower employees across different skill levels to contribute to the development lifecycle.

The following summarizes the differences between the roles:

Professional Developers

Professional developers focus on creating complex applications and services. They are responsible for the entire development lifecycle, including design, coding, testing, and versioning. They have a deep understanding of software architecture, permissions, and roles. Professional developers often work alongside other roles to provide expertise that extends beyond standard frameworks, ensuring that complex business logic is implemented securely and efficiently.

Administrators

IT Administrators ensure the governance, operations, and technical monitoring of the entire landscape. They manage the lifecycle of business applications and processes by controlling upgrades and technical security. Their role is to coordinate the path to production, ensuring that all assets created by developers meet the required standards before they reach the productive environment. They also manage essential platform components such as service instances, destinations, evironments and authorizations within SAP BTP and SAP Build.

Citizen Developers

Citizen developers are business experts who identify and improve processes within their specific departments. They design and deploy focused applications and automated workflows that address immediate business needs. By leveraging AI-assisted development and natural language capabilities, they can create functional solutions without requiring extensive technical backgrounds.</p> <p>Citizen developers often work in tandem with professional developers. While citizen developers focus on the business logic and user experience of departmental tools, professional developers provide the robust architecture and complex integrations required for enterprise-scale solutions. This collaborative approach ensures that applications are both agile and technically sound.