Guest Per­spec­tive of The Busi­ness Val­ue of the SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Platform

The SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) is the lat­est in a series of SAP offer­ings that seek to orga­nize a dis­parate set of tech­nolo­gies and ser­vices into a sin­gle omnibus ​“prod­uct” that is sup­posed to make it eas­i­er to mar­ket and sell. Those who remem­ber SAP NetWeaver know this strat­e­gy rarely suc­ceeds as intend­ed. Ana­lysts like me spent a good deal of time work­ing with cus­tomers and part­ners to decode NetWeaver’s dif­fer­ent com­po­nents and use cases.

The same is now true for BTP and BTP use cas­es.

That’s because BTP in SAP offers up the same prob­lem — and the same oppor­tu­ni­ties. It’s a kitchen sink of tools and ser­vices — data man­age­ment, ana­lyt­ics, AI, ML, automa­tion, appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment, and inte­gra­tion — that also func­tions as a plat­form for deploy­ing indus­try-spe­cif­ic process­es and cus­tomiza­tions. Assem­bling these dif­fer­ent capa­bil­i­ties under a sin­gle rubric hap­pens when an over-abun­dance of tech­no­log­i­cal choic­es meets marketing’s des­per­a­tion to over-simplify. 

What BTP Is and Isn’t

So, once again, we go into the breach with an explain­er of sorts about what BTP is and, in par­tic­u­lar, why it’s called a busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy plat­form in SAP. It’s just a hodge­podge of tools and ser­vices, right? In most cas­es, BTP is no dif­fer­ent than sim­i­lar sets of tools and ser­vices offered by near­ly all major enter­prise soft­ware ven­dors and hyper­scalers, right? 

Right. But there are some very good rea­sons to exam­ine BTP more close­ly, espe­cial­ly as many SAP cus­tomers already have some ver­sion of a BTP license that came with their SAP S/4HANA or RISE with SAP con­tract. Here are two of my top rea­sons why BTP is impor­tant to your organization’s busi­ness goals: 

Indus­try-Spe­cif­ic Func­tion­al­i­ty Runs Only on BTP

For the last sev­er­al decades, the true call­ing at SAP has been its depth of indus­try func­tion­al­i­ty: R/3 and ECC were dis­tin­guished and appre­ci­at­ed because of deep indus­try func­tion­al­i­ty. SAP has con­tin­ued the tra­di­tion in two impor­tant ways.

• The first is that SAP S/4HANA has a fair amount of indus­try-spe­cif­ic func­tion­al­i­ty baked into its pri­vate and pub­lic cloud edi­tions as part of its ​“clean core” capa­bil­i­ties. But not every­thing is in the core. 

That’s where BTP plays an impor­tant, if large­ly unrec­og­nized, role. SAP con­tin­ues to add new indus­try-spe­cif­ic func­tion­al­i­ty, not in the S/4HANA clean core. Rather, many new indus­try-spe­cif­ic process­es have been designed by SAP to run as exten­sions on BTP. No BTP, no advanced indus­try functionality.

• The abil­i­ty to be the plat­form for indus­try-spe­cif­ic exten­sions not built by SAP is the sec­ond way in which BTP will extend the SAP tra­di­tion and posi­tion as an indus­try-func­tion­al­i­ty leader. That role will be enhanced by part­ner- and cus­tomer-devel­oped indus­try exten­sions. Those exten­sions will have a home run­ning on BTP. Impor­tant­ly, this includes sup­port­ing the migra­tion of lega­cy process­es to BTP that are too valu­able to leave behind in a migra­tion to SAP S/4HANA but for which no appro­pri­ate S/4HANA or part­ner replace­ment exists.

The abil­i­ty of BTP to aug­ment the clean core con­cepts behind SAP S/4HANA with indus­try-spe­cif­ic exten­sions, which are real­ly next-gen­er­a­tion cus­tomiza­tions that work with­in the cloud SaaS mod­el, is, unfor­tu­nate­ly, an aspect of BTP some­times miss­ing in the BTP infor­ma­tion flow and conversation. 

BTP Man­ages Data and Integration

Man­ag­ing data and inte­gra­tion may seem like not-too-excit­ing capa­bil­i­ties that every plat­form pro­vides, and in many ways, they are. But for SAP’s nascent Busi­ness Net­works ini­tia­tive, these capa­bil­i­ties are para­mount. SAP Busi­ness Net­work lets a com­pa­ny man­age com­plex busi­ness inter­ac­tions — sup­ply chain, part­ner, pric­ing, asset, and logis­tics, among oth­ers — in a sin­gle, many-to-many net­worked environment.

The Busi­ness Net­work func­tions as a por­tal for col­lab­o­ra­tion in near-real time with busi­ness part­ners, prod­uct track and trace func­tion­al­i­ty, the shar­ing of inven­to­ry avail­abil­i­ty, and oth­er impor­tant require­ments that can great­ly ben­e­fit from the many-to-many inter­ac­tion mod­el of the network. 

It also means that tasks like ESG com­pli­ance, which can be a huge bur­den for small­er com­pa­nies that need to com­plete these qual­i­fi­ca­tions for every busi­ness rela­tion­ship, can be under­tak­en once, with the results made avail­able to any com­pa­ny on the Busi­ness Net­work. Par­tic­i­pa­tion in the SAP Busi­ness Net­work will dri­ve sig­nif­i­cant effi­cien­cies and open up new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties. Join­ing the Busi­ness Net­work should be on the radar for the major­i­ty of SAP customers. 

Con­nect­ed and Deeply Inte­grat­ed Processes

What does this have to do with BTP? SAP’s Busi­ness Net­work works best when indi­vid­ual mem­bers’ dis­parate, dis­con­nect­ed inter­nal process­es have been engi­neered for deep inte­gra­tion. If, for exam­ple, a sup­pli­er wants to ful­fill an order placed by a Net­work buy­er, that sup­pli­er may need to pro­vide the buy­er vis­i­bil­i­ty into the supplier’s sup­ply chain and man­u­fac­tur­ing capa­bil­i­ties to qual­i­fy for the job. Meet­ing those require­ments man­dates inte­grat­ed process­es and access to nor­mal­ized data that can be used to report on these capa­bil­i­ties to partners. 

That’s where BTP comes in. That BTP kitchen sink has a pletho­ra of inte­gra­tion tools and APIs to apply to the inte­gra­tion side of the prob­lem, as well as a vast array of data man­age­ment tools need­ed to actu­al­ly real­ize the kind of process inte­gra­tion that the Busi­ness Net­work is built to sup­port. It’s pos­si­ble to meet these require­ments with­out BTP. But for SAP cus­tomers, and any cus­tomer of the Busi­ness Net­work, BTP has the req­ui­site capa­bil­i­ties built-in and well-tuned to meet the Network’s requirements. 

These are only a few of the many busi­ness-ori­ent­ed capa­bil­i­ties with­in SAP BTP plat­forms. ASUG mem­bers and the SAP com­mu­ni­ty will expand their BTP knowl­edge and under­stand­ing at the upcom­ing ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP S/4HANA and Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) Con­fer­ence. More event infor­ma­tion can be found here, and you can reg­is­ter here.

Joshua Green­baum is the Prin­ci­pal at Enter­prise Appli­ca­tion Consulting.