The Basis of SAP Business Technology Platform 

Enterprises with a robust technology platform can quickly adapt to changing demands and ever-evolving business processes, leading to higher scores on customer satisfaction, brand perception, and talent management.

SAP BTP is at the center of SAP’s strategy to support intelligent, sustainable enterprises, being a business-centric platform with cutting-edge technology that drives innovation, automation, flexibility, and agility.

Using SAP BTP, enterprises can, in a single cloud-based platform, quickly build, extend, and integrate both SAP and third-party applications with the possibility of also adding reporting capabilities, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The Five Pillars of SAP BTP

The foundation of SAP BTP is supported by five pillars. Let’s explore them in-depth.

1. Application Development

The SAP BTP application development capabilities allow organizations to develop cloud applications customized to their business needs. These capabilities span across different development skills, from Low Code / No Code (LCNC) to Pro Code.

The LCNC capability enables citizen developers to build cloud applications without having a solid technological background. The SAP BTP LCNC portfolio includes:

SAP Build Apps: Develop enterprise applications without writing code.

SAP Build Process Automation: Automate workflow processes and tasks with intuitive drag-and-drop functionalities.

SAP Build Work Zone: Design engaging business sites for seamless task execution across all enterprise applications.

The Pro Code capabilities are meant for classical developers with advanced programming skills. The capabilities include:

ABAP Environment: Leverage Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) know-how to run ABAP applications in the cloud.

SAP Business Application Studio: Utilize the integrated development environment (IDE) to boost developer productivity with tools and frameworks optimized for Java, JavaScript (Node.js), and SAP Fiori.

Cloud Native: Build highly scalable, resilient, and manageable applications.

2. Integration

The SAP BTP Integration Suite is a holistic integration platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Business processes can be seamlessly integrated using state-of-the-art integration tools and leveraging the extended portfolio of SAP and third-party pre-built integrations.

Different integration scenarios and lines of business are covered natively by the SAP Integration Suite, including Application to Application (A2A), Business to Business (B2B), Business to Government (B2G), event-based integrations, and extract-transform-load, amongst other scenarios.

The SAP Integration Suite offers an extensive integration tool portfolio:

Cloud Integration: Enterprise-grade middleware, offering a wide range of out-of-box integration content and protocols that allow rapid building and enablement of integrations between different systems and applications

API Management: Manage the full lifecycle of APIs, from the building to the deployment process, adding an extra layer of security through a pre-defined set of policies and allowing extended and centralized monitoring capabilities

Event Mesh: One or more event brokers that allow your applications to communicate asynchronously, in real-time, and reliably at scale

Integration Advisor: Community-driven repository that can be used to accelerate the mapping process in an integration scenario

OpenConnectors: Pre-built web-service-based connectors to commonly used applications such as SharePoint, email servers, social networks, and CRMs, allowing for faster setup of the integration

Integration Assessment: A comprehensive framework that helps accelerate hybrid integration platform design, safeguards integration projects based on SAP best practices, and enables an agile integration practice across the organization

3. Automation

Beyond application development and integration, SAP BTP emphasizes automation to relieve employees from routine tasks. Optimizing and eventually fully automating routine tasks enables employees to focus on high-value tasks that drive enterprise growth.

The main automation offering in SAP BTP is the SAP Build Process Automation, which is composed of the following tools:

Workflow Management: Automate workflows that span across different SAP applications.

Business Rules: Apply automation through rule-based decision-making. 

Robot Process Automation: Create intelligent bots for task automation.

Task Center: Improve employee productivity by centralizing tasks from different SAP applications (e.g., approve leave requests in SuccessFactors, approve expense reports in Concur) in a single application.

4. Data and Analytics

Getting the maximum value out of the data is a key priority in organizations. SAP BTP Data & Analytics enables you to work with data and combine it with non-application data to conduct extended planning across entire organizations.

The portfolio of SAP BTP Data & Analytics includes:

SAP HANA Cloud: The star of the persistence layer in the SAP BTP is the SAP HANA Cloud, a modern database-as-a-service with strong in-memory capabilities that can work with both structured and unstructured data.

Data Management and Data Warehouse: On top of the SAP HANA Cloud, there are data warehouse capabilities that allow users to extract and process data from different sources.

• SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) : This all-in-one cloud product is offered as a software as a service (SaaS) for business intelligence (BI), planning, and predictive analytics. Built natively on SAP BTP, it provides a unified and secure public cloud experience to maximize data-driven decision-making.

5. Artificial Intelligence

SAP BTP AI capabilities infuse intelligence into business processes by automating, optimizing, and reimagining these processes across lines of businesses by natively embedding AI services into the SAP applications.

Within SAP BTP are SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad services that can be used to manage, deploy, and integrate custom AI modules in the SAP applications.

In addition to the custom AI modules, SAP BTP offers a range of services that are supported by machine learning: 

• Document Classification  

• Business Entity Recognition  

• Document Information Extraction  

• Personalized Recommendation  

• Data Attribute Recommendation  

• Service Ticket Intelligence

Conclusion

SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is based on five pillars that together provide a powerful platform for building, deploying, and managing enterprise applications to help drive digital transformation and innovation within organizations.

With SAP BTP's cutting-edge capabilities—application development, integration, automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence—you can increase employee productivity and maximize the value of your existing SAP SuccessFactors solution.