ASUG recently introduced a new event format—ASUG Community Conversations—with a premier roundtable discussion focused on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). This new approach to member engagement marks a pivotal shift, spotlighting peer-led insights and open dialogue over traditional, one-way learning.
The inaugural session, Exploring SAP BTP: Understanding ASUG Member Community Needs, featured voices from across the SAP ecosystem including:
- Vikas Lodha, SAP Vice President - Data and Platform, Product Success, Chief Solution Advisor and SAP POC
- Harish Manohar, Senior Manager of SAP Digital Transformation at Jabil
- Sukarna Chirumamilla, Enterprise Architect at Florida Crystals
- Tushar Pradhan, Product Manager at SAP
- ASUG Community Volunteer of the Year, Tammy Powlas
Moderated by ASUG’s Community Engagement Lead Elizabeth Tuckwell, the conversation encouraged real-time participation through polls, live Q&A, and open discussion, addressing the community’s most pressing questions and content priorities.
The goal was clear: provide the SAP community with a platform to ask questions, share experiences, and shape future programming based on the evolving needs of the ASUG community.
The session delivered meaningful value by exploring real use cases, common challenges, and forward-looking strategies for adopting and scaling BTP capabilities. By creating a space for shared discovery, ASUG helped community members feel seen, heard, and equipped with actionable insights.
The discussion reinforced BTP’s growing role as SAP’s core platform for development, integration, and business transformation. At the same time, it highlighted a key awareness gap: many users remain unaware of how deeply embedded BTP is in their existing operations. Speakers addressed this disconnect by offering practical context on key areas like clean core practices, extensibility, and integration architecture.
The session delivered insights from a wide range of practitioners:
- Harish Manohar, Senior Manager of SAP Digital Transformation at Jabil, shared a detailed look at Jabil’s clean core journey, including its brownfield S/4HANA migration of a 67 TB instance in 2022. A major outcome was the decommissioning of nearly 31% of custom code. Manohar walked through the company’s extensibility governance model, tailored to SAP’s tiered development approach.
- SAP Product Manager, Tushar Pradhan, explored the SAP Integration Suite in-depth, underscoring its role as a hybrid integration platform. From cloud-to-cloud to edge deployment, he described BTP’s ability to unify disparate integration systems. He also discussed SAP’s evolving toolkit, including Event Mesh, Integration Advisor, and the Edge Integration Cell—and emphasized that governance and methodology must guide integration efforts.
- Sukarna Chirumamilla, an Enterprise Architect at Florida Crystals, shared how his company migrated over 400 interfaces to BTP and is now completing a major EDI modernization project using Trading Partner Management. He noted the company’s shift to a single, cloud-based integration and an API-first strategy, highlighting future plans to move toward real-time, event-based architectures.
Interactive polling led by Tammy Powlas, a Senior Business Analyst at Fairfax Water who was recently recognized as ASUG’s Community Volunteer of the Year, also featured prominently in the session. Powlas encouraged attendees to vote on future content priorities, ranging from ABAP Cloud deep dives and SAP Analytics Cloud to best practices for setting up a BTP Center of Excellence. Core needs emerged from the discussion, including:
- Clearer education on SAP-to-SAP integration
- Best practices for setting up a BTP Center of Excellence (CoE)
- Understanding tools and cost estimation for BTP services
Powlas also emphasized the importance of topics like cybersecurity and integration with SAP and non-SAP systems. These insights, gathered in real time from the community, will directly inform the upcoming ASUG programming development, demonstrating the power of this new format to surface and address real member challenges.
ASUG Members can look forward to more opportunities like this -- both virtual and in- person Community Conversations -- that are responsive, interactive, and shaped by the community itself. For the BTP community specifically, a dedicated ASUG Community Conversation: SAP BTP and SAP BDC drive innovation is scheduled at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, alongside several BTP-focused sessions and pre-conference activities.
In the meantime, members are encouraged to stay connected through the SAP BTP Resource Center and the SAP BTP LinkedIn Group, which serve as year-round hubs for knowledge exchange and peer support.
The debut of ASUG Community Conversations marks the beginning of a more inclusive and engaged chapter in the ASUG experience—one where member voices help shape the journey. Please join us for the next one find your ASUG Community here.