One of the big challenges companies face is adapting to changing requirements quickly. An ever-changing business environment and customers' demand for new features and services can put a lot of pressure on companies to innovate or risk falling behind competitors.
It is crucial that they have strategies and capabilities in place to adapt to new trends and technologies, and ideally even shape some of these themselves.
What Are Winning Organizations Looking to Achieve?
Here are a few strategies that can help businesses address these challenges. By adopting these strategies, companies can better navigate the pressures of evolving customer demands and competitive landscapes.
Agility:
- React quickly to market changes and emerging opportunities.
- Meets business needs with agility and assurance.
- Competes and thrives in this digital age.
Innovation:
- Achieve amazing business outcomes and innovative breakthroughs.
- Differentiate and set them apart from the competition.
- Transforms the business and becomes an innovative disruptor.
SAP Commerce Cloud: Flexible and Adaptable
A key part of SAP Commerce Cloud‘s success has always been its flexibility and ability to help companies adapt to changing requirements. By allowing the addition of custom extensions to SAP Commerce Cloud, development teams can add new functionalities and help businesses provide the features their customer base needs and desires.
While powerful, this way of customizing SAP Commerce Cloud does come with some challenges and risks. Just think of the issues that arise when the system needs to be updated with a new release from SAP. Development teams need to put in a lot of work to make sure their custom code is still compatible post-update.
And this is where SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) comes in.
SAP Business Technology Platform
A Comprehensive Platform of Interoperable Technologies
SAP BTP, as you can see, is a powerful platform that handles many crucial aspects of what modern businesses are trying to achieve. Anything from providing the power of AI, helping to integrate business processes, or connecting to third-party systems. But we are currently interested in how to add more functionality to SAP Commerce Cloud as effectively as possible. So, we want to focus on using SAP BTP for development work.
Extend Wisely: Our Approach to Composability
Instead of focusing on adding custom code to the SAP Commerce Cloud application, SAP BTP allows development teams to develop additional features side-by-side. APIs, events, and webhooks are used to pass data between systems or trigger functionality built-in SAP BTP.
SAP BTP provides professional developers with a robust development environment through the Business Application Studio (BAS), which supports all modern coding practices. BAS also serves as a platform for utilizing low-code tools related to application building, which facilitate the use of application frameworks and development kits. This setup streamlines tasks for classic developers, making it easier to create desktop, hybrid, or even specific mobile applications.
Anyone with little or no coding skills can utilize SAP Build Apps, a no-code tool integrated into the platform, to build apps and extensions. By using visual programming, this tool enables the creation of solutions without any coding, using templates and industry best practices.
Another option for developers is to use SAP BTP, Kyma runtime. Kyma is a fully managed Kubernetes runtime based on the open-source project "Kyma". This cloud-native solution allows developers to extend SAP solutions with serverless functions and combine them with containerized microservices. The offered functionality ensures smooth consumption of SAP and non-SAP applications, running workloads in a highly scalable environment, and building event- and API-based extensions.
Beyond developing themselves, customers can access a wide catalog of prebuilt content on SAP BTP.
Benefits of Using BTP to Extend
Visual development environment: tailored for efficient development of business applications for the intelligent enterprise. Based on some of the industry’s best IDEs and tools, providing full, tool-independent, developer flexibility.
Modern and intuitive Web user interface: Users can design engaging digital workspaces to connect and collaborate.
Accelerated time-to-market: High-productivity development tools help get code out faster. Automate workflow processes and tasks with drag-and-drop simplicity. Set up the development environment simpler and more quickly.
Highly adopted SAP BTP service: Adoption across all channels, with thousands of paying customers. Build cloud-ready extensions that maximize your investments across SAP applications, leveraging tight integration with SAP services, technologies, and systems.
Accelerate development and automation: Use low-code, pro-code, and generative AI tools. Take an intuitive path from visual tools to professional development tools. Optimize developer efficiency with generative AI and prebuilt content for developers of all skill levels.
Summary
- SAP offers side-by-side extension options using SAP BTP, to ensure companies retain the necessary flexibility without the need to add custom code to the SAP Commerce Cloud application.
- This platform offers modern development environments, no-code/low-code capabilities, and modern tools such as generative AI, to make the life of developers easier.
- By using SAP BTP to add functionality to SAP Commerce Cloud, companies can reduce costs, accelerate time-to-market, and provide better experiences for their development teams.