In our lat­est ASUG Asks the Authors fea­ture, we sit down with Smitha Ban­da, a senior busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er at SAP who leads the SAP BTP prac­tice for North Amer­i­ca; Shiba­ji Chan­dra, a sea­soned con­sult­ing archi­tect at SAP who has in-depth knowl­edge and exper­tise in SAP BTP; and Chun Aun Gooi, an SAP BTP archi­tect and devel­op­er. All three are the authors of ​“SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form: An Intro­duc­tion,” from SAP Press. 

In this first part of our con­ver­sa­tion, we dis­cuss the impe­tus behind this pub­li­ca­tion, the chal­lenge of struc­tur­ing its chap­ters, and the use cas­es they select­ed to show­case a breadth of BTP offerings.

Q: What ini­tial­ly led you three to write this book?

Ban­da: We are a part of SAP Con­sult­ing Ser­vices, and our team focus­es on BTP con­sult­ing. We are the BTP experts with­in the con­sult­ing orga­ni­za­tion of SAP, help­ing cus­tomers with pro­to­types, strate­gies, and imple­men­ta­tions. So, we had the knowl­edge, and Shiba­ji was the one who came up with the idea of actu­al­ly writ­ing the book. From there, we said, ​“How can we go about doing that?” Obvi­ous­ly, we want­ed to pub­lish it through SAP Press, so the three of us came togeth­er. Every­thing else is his­to­ry now.

Chan­dra: We’d been con­sult­ing on BTP for a long time, and we real­ized our team had the depth of knowl­edge nec­es­sary to write a book that would help out many cus­tomers and part­ners. We were fac­ing some com­mon, repeat­ed ques­tions that we knew we could give answers to through our book.

Ban­da: These were fun­da­men­tal ques­tions, too: ​“What is BTP?” Answer­ing that can become com­plex, which is why we want­ed to write a book you could pick up, read, and learn enough from to have an intel­li­gent, in-depth con­ver­sa­tion about BTP. The book starts with the basics but extends through tech­ni­cal archi­tec­ture, design­ing solu­tions, and more. The main idea was to famil­iar­ize peo­ple new to BTP through one book ver­sus requir­ing them to go through 10 dif­fer­ent arti­cles to gath­er information. 

Q. There’s so much ground to cov­er in writ­ing about a uni­fied busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy plat­form. What was your approach to orga­niz­ing this explo­ration of SAP BTP?

Ban­da: It took us about two and a half months to final­ize the table of con­tents. Can you imag­ine? [all laugh] It wasn’t easy because BTP is vast. To cov­er an intro­duc­tion to BTP, draw­ing lines as to what was beyond the book’s scope and what should be includ­ed and exclud­ed took a lot of work.

There are three parts to the book: ​“Get­ting Start­ed,” which is basi­cal­ly the intro­duc­tion, and then ​“Appli­ca­tion Archi­tec­ture and Design,” and then ​“Use Cas­es.” If, for exam­ple, you’re not inter­est­ed in archi­tect­ing or design­ing the appli­ca­tions, but you’re a project man­ag­er who needs to under­stand what BTP is, part one will serve your pur­pose. But if you are an archi­tect, a devel­op­ment lead, or a busi­ness lead, and you need to under­stand how you’re going to use the tech­nol­o­gy to help your busi­ness, then you need parts two and three. 

Part two is our appli­ca­tion archi­tec­ture and design, more going into the dif­fer­ent ser­vices. There, we strug­gled with how to struc­ture the book, and we basi­cal­ly approached it by group­ing it based on the pil­lars of BTP. 

Part three is more focused on the use cas­es because unless you know how you’re going to use the tech­nol­o­gy, you can’t put that tech­nol­o­gy to use. If you have IoT, for exam­ple, but don’t under­stand where you can use IoT, it’s not use­ful. Sim­i­lar­ly, BTP has a lot of ser­vices, tools, and prod­ucts under its umbrel­la, but if you don’t know how to put them togeth­er, they’re not going to be of any use. Our use cas­es give read­ers ideas on how to use BTP. 

Chan­dra: My chal­lenge was that I didn’t know where to start writ­ing. Once I start, it’s always a flow, but where I should start was a big ques­tion. I worked on the sec­ond sec­tion as I thought it would be eas­i­er to struc­ture; I under­stand archi­tec­ture and its deci­sion met­rics, so I knew we could write that sec­tion by keep­ing a cer­tain con­sult­ing mindset. 

The real chal­lenges involved use cas­es, which we need­ed read­ers to engage with and con­nect to, remain­ing both hypo­thet­i­cal and rel­e­vant. Chun Aun and I read met­rics for each use case, deter­min­ing which use cas­es touched best upon which kinds of tech­ni­cal areas so that we could cov­er a max­i­mum breadth of BTP. We arranged the use cas­es based on that. And these use cas­es did not only exist on paper; we actu­al­ly did the projects, and we have a GitHub repos­i­to­ry where we have that code. 

Gooi: It was def­i­nite­ly more chal­leng­ing to write about the use cas­es. For peo­ple who read the book to feel con­nect­ed, what­ev­er we wrote in the use cas­es chap­ter had to be some­thing we had already built. You need to have access to the sys­tem, you actu­al­ly build it, and then you take a screen­shot that is not made up. We spent most of our efforts on the use cas­es chapter.

Ban­da: Our focus was more on relata­bil­i­ty to read­ers in real-world sce­nar­ios. For every­thing we wrote in the book, we tried to find an exam­ple. With the inte­gra­tion chap­ter, we start­ed with an exam­ple of how a com­pa­ny is in a sit­u­a­tion where they need to do X, Y, and Z and how BTP can help solve that chal­lenge. It was the same with the use cas­es, user inter­faces, and ana­lyt­ics; whichev­er chap­ter, tech­nol­o­gy, or tool we talked about in the book, we tried to make relat­able to the real world.

Q. Can you elab­o­rate on the use cas­es dis­cussed in the book?

Chan­dra: Our pri­ma­ry objec­tive was to go over a breadth of BTP offer­ings, through var­i­ous BTP ser­vices, across dif­fer­ent Line-of-Busi­ness (LoB) solu­tions. Strate­gi­cal­ly, BTP is posi­tioned as the inte­gra­tion and exten­sion plat­form for all LoB solu­tions: SAP and non-SAP, on-premis­es and Cloud … What we tried to do is con­sid­er all the LoB solu­tions we had: SAP S/4HANA, SAP Ari­ba, SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, SAP Con­cur, SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment … We tried to build up the exten­sion sce­nar­ios around those LoB solu­tions and touch upon cer­tain BTP offer­ings. In the Ari­ba sce­nario, we tried to touch upon SAP Data Inte­gra­tion tools, for example. 

On the one hand, we are try­ing to give audi­ences ideas for how to build exten­sions on top of var­i­ous LoB solu­tions. On the oth­er hand, we are try­ing to high­light dif­fer­ent BTP ser­vices to cater to dif­fer­ent needs. If you read a chap­ter on S/4HANA exten­sions, for exam­ple, that doesn’t mean you always have to take its spe­cif­ic approach of S/4HANA exten­sions. There is anoth­er chap­ter where we use Cloud Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming (CAP) for exten­sions, and you can apply that line of think­ing to S/4HANA exten­sions as well. Each chap­ter gives you an idea of pos­si­ble areas to look at, but you can also mix and match tech­nol­o­gy choic­es dis­cussed in oth­er chapters.

Ban­da: All the ser­vices, tools, and prod­ucts avail­able for cus­tomers as part of the SAP suite of prod­ucts, you can mix and match those to build your solu­tions on BTP. Our sec­tion on use cas­es focus­es on those com­bi­na­tions. It also does­n’t have to be S/4HANA; a big mis­con­cep­tion in the field is that you need to be on S/4HANA to use BTP. That’s not the case; BTP can be used whether it’s SAP or non-SAP, S/4 or ECC, or what­ev­er. BTP is a tech­nol­o­gy plat­form; it pro­vides you with tools and ser­vices, and then you mix and match those with your LoB solu­tions — SAP, non-SAP, Cloud, on-prem — to real­ize a busi­ness challenge. 

Chan­dra: Addi­tion­al­ly, if you look at some use cas­es, such as those for mul­ti-ten­ant appli­ca­tions or scal­able appli­ca­tions through SAP BTP Kyma — a ful­ly man­aged Kuber­netes run­time — these are intro­duc­tions that explore ways you can scale up an appli­ca­tion. We always tried to pro­vide a busi­ness con­text. For those par­tic­u­lar cas­es, there were no LoB solu­tions tied up to them. It’s a stand­alone appli­ca­tion that cus­tomers might want to scale up, and we explain how you can scale it up by lever­ag­ing Kyma run­time. Those chap­ters are not relat­ed to any LoB application.

We were inspired by real cus­tomer use cas­es, tweaked them a lit­tle for obvi­ous rea­sons, then mixed and matched their require­ments with those of oth­er cus­tomers. To ensure that our solu­tions were fea­si­ble, we built all these use cas­es on the sys­tem. You only see the tip of the ice­berg in our book, but those screen­shots are real. We had to build all these projects, even for mul­ti-ten­an­cy and Kyma run­time. We built the entire project, deliv­ered on BTP, ensured it was work­ing, and then wrote. 

Ban­da: The use cas­es chap­ter gives you the art of the pos­si­ble. And we want read­ers to know they can mix and match these use cas­es because you can mix and match the ser­vices and prod­ucts to build your solu­tions. The use cas­es are not hard­bound to what we present.

“SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form: An Intro­duc­tion” is now avail­able from SAP Press.