As SAP cus­tomers and SAP exec­u­tive speak­ers gath­ered in Glen­dale, Ari­zona, to share their expe­ri­ences, exper­tise, and insights at the ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP S/4HANA and SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) con­fer­ence ear­li­er this month, one of the most excit­ing keynote address­es came from Bha­gat Nainani, SVP of Prod­uct Devel­op­ment at SAP.

Dur­ing his day-two keynote, titled ​“Build Exten­sions & Inte­gra­tions Across Your Enter­prise with SAP BTP,” Nainani reflect­ed upon the impor­tance of the SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form as the foun­da­tion of the intel­li­gent enter­prise and zeroed in on the appli­ca­tion exten­sions and inte­gra­tion solu­tions that cus­tomers can uti­lize to strength­en their busi­ness process­es and sim­pli­fy their jour­neys to SAP S/4HANA.

Speak­ing with ASUG at the con­fer­ence short­ly fol­low­ing the SAP announce­ment of SAP Data­s­phere, Nainani dis­cussed the cur­rent state of the SAP cus­tomer jour­ney with SAP BTP, major focus areas he’ll explore in 2023, and the SAP imper­a­tive to make it easy for its cus­tomers to con­sume innovations.

This is an edit­ed ver­sion of the conversation. 

Ques­tion: Your keynote ses­sion at this con­fer­ence was titled ​“Build Exten­sions & Inte­gra­tions Across Your Enter­prise with SAP BTP,” and through­out it, you focused on strate­giz­ing SAP S/4HANA exten­sions, lever­ag­ing appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment, automa­tion, and inte­gra­tion capa­bil­i­ties on SAP BTP. Why was this the right focus for this keynote?

Answer: Many SAP cus­tomers are in the mid­dle of broad­er busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion ini­tia­tives. They’re either mov­ing some of their work­flows to the cloud, mod­ern­iz­ing their busi­ness process­es, or look­ing at how they can con­nect dif­fer­ent parts of their enter­prise togeth­er to opti­mize their sup­ply chain. As part of that, they strive to use SAP stan­dard appli­ca­tions, such as finance ERPs. How­ev­er, in most cas­es, they need to cus­tomize these to meet their spe­cif­ic busi­ness needs or inte­grate with oth­er appli­ca­tions that are part of the busi­ness process. 

Addi­tion­al­ly, many orga­ni­za­tions have het­ero­ge­neous envi­ron­ments. When they look at their end-to-end busi­ness process­es, they must inte­grate with oth­er sys­tems that are both SAP and non-SAP. At this point, when they are amid their trans­for­ma­tion projects, these inte­gra­tions are critical. 

Q: Speak­ing with cus­tomers at con­fer­ences like this one, what have you observed about the ear­ly adop­tion of SAP BTP and its rel­e­vance to cus­tomers’ busi­ness challenges?

A: In the past, if you look at SAP’s tra­di­tion­al ECC cus­tomer base, when it came to extend­ing or cus­tomiz­ing process­es, many orga­ni­za­tions would most­ly turn to the ABAP run­time and cus­tomize the code to their needs right in their ERP sys­tem. While that was very pow­er­ful, that lim­it­ed a company’s abil­i­ty to con­sume new inno­va­tions from SAP. Many times, when a new ERP release was avail­able, cus­tomiza­tions had to be redone. So, it often became a choice between con­sum­ing the new ERP capa­bil­i­ties or keep­ing cus­tomiza­tions stable. 

Today, SAP is pro­mot­ing the con­cept of the ​“clean core.” The idea of clean core is that com­pa­nies devel­op their exten­sions in an upgrade-safe way. They can build them around their stan­dard busi­ness appli­ca­tion with­out chang­ing the core of the appli­ca­tion itself. With that, cus­tomers get the same val­ue, while they’re also able to con­sume inno­va­tions from SAP at a much faster rate by upgrad­ing seamlessly. 

BTP is the foun­da­tion of the clean core con­cept. It enables com­pa­nies to extend and inte­grate with­out chang­ing the core of the appli­ca­tion but still allows them to extend and cus­tomize busi­ness process­es to their very spe­cif­ic needs. This is where SAP BTP is also dif­fer­ent from hyper­scaler plat­forms. BTP is pur­pose-built to help cus­tomers extend their SAP appli­ca­tions and max­i­mize the val­ue of SAP systems. 

Q: Com­pared to a year ago, do you feel that cus­tomers are now gen­er­al­ly fur­ther along in their adop­tion and under­stand­ing of SAP BTP and its capabilities?

A: Absolute­ly, they’re cer­tain­ly fur­ther along than they were two years ago. I also believe that, at SAP, we’re respon­si­ble for ensur­ing our cus­tomers under­stand the val­ue of BTP. We’ve also had our own chal­lenges get­ting there. In the past, we had the SAP Cloud Plat­form, the pre­de­ces­sor of BTP, which had a lot of indi­vid­ual ser­vices. The intent was to offer very gran­u­lar ser­vices so that cus­tomers could use what they want­ed. The chal­lenge with that was when our cus­tomers want­ed to use mul­ti­ple ser­vices togeth­er, the expe­ri­ence and out­comes were not cohesive. 

With BTP, we look at our cus­tomers’ needs more holis­ti­cal­ly and have iden­ti­fied broad­er areas where we can add val­ue: ana­lyt­ics, inte­gra­tion, (low-code) app devel­op­ment, and automa­tion. We brought our relat­ed ser­vices togeth­er and made them much eas­i­er to con­sume. We focus on ele­vat­ing the user expe­ri­ence, and addi­tion­al­ly, we deliv­er very tight inte­gra­tions with our line-of-busi­ness prod­ucts like SAP S/4HANA, SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, etc. With that, we want to make BTP the de fac­to choice for SAP customers. 

For exam­ple, we launched SAP Build to improve pro­duc­tiv­i­ty for devel­op­ing exten­sions for both pro­fes­sion­al and busi­ness users and brought SAP Build Process Automa­tion, SAP Build Apps, and SAP Build Work Zone clos­er togeth­er. Just now, we launched the SAP Data­s­phere, which brings togeth­er our var­i­ous data ana­lyt­ics and data ware­house offerings. 

Sim­i­lar­ly, we did this with SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite a few years back. We used to have SAP Open Con­nec­tors and SAP API Man­age­ment as stand­alone offer­ings. Today, it’s all one very easy-to-use prod­uct, with all our cus­tomers’ inte­gra­tion needs in one product. 

SAP is com­mit­ted to this path: we will make it easy for our cus­tomers to con­sume our solu­tions on BTP. Look­ing at this curve, there is still a lot of aware­ness that we must build. Around 17,000 of our cus­tomers are using BTP already. That’s less com­pared to the more than 400,000 SAP cus­tomers. Our goal is to help all SAP cus­tomers pur­sue their clean core strat­e­gy and accel­er­ate their trans­for­ma­tion journeys. 

Q: What are the major focus areas for you in 2023 regard­ing SAP BTP? 

A: One focus area is low-code app devel­op­ment and automa­tion to improve pro­duc­tiv­i­ty for any­one build­ing, extend­ing, and automat­ing appli­ca­tions, this way also get­ting busi­ness experts more invest­ed in co-cre­at­ing soft­ware solutions. 

In appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment, we’re also bring­ing ABAP devel­op­ers clos­er to SAP BTP, so that they can lever­age their exist­ing invest­ments in ABAP and build on them, as they’re using BTP to extend. A lot of our exist­ing cus­tomers have a rich skillset in ABAP devel­op­ment. It’s a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty to bring these devel­op­ers and their knowl­edge along as our cus­tomers mod­ern­ize their stack. 

For inte­gra­tion, the big focus is migrat­ing our cus­tomers’ inte­gra­tions from on-prem to the cloud along with their appli­ca­tions. We had a lot of cus­tomers doing what we call PI-PO, mean­ing SAP Process Inte­gra­tion and SAP Process Orches­tra­tion for the inte­gra­tion of on-premis­es appli­ca­tions. Sup­port­ing cus­tomers in migrat­ing those to the cloud with SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite is a big focus area. 

The third one is tying our prod­ucts back to the end-to-end busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion offer­ing from SAP Sig­navio. Before cus­tomers start their jour­ney, we rec­om­mend that they intro­spect their busi­ness process­es, under­stand the bot­tle­necks, under­stand where they need to make improve­ments, and use that to dri­ve changes and automa­tions that they can do on BTP. 

On the data side, one major area is SAP Data­s­phere, the evo­lu­tion of SAP Data Ware­house Cloud that allows cus­tomers to access data, regard­less of where it is stored, from both SAP and non-SAP data systems. 

Q: Giv­en the announce­ment of SAP Data­s­phere at this con­fer­ence, can you describe and clar­i­fy the rela­tion­ship between SAP Data­s­phere and SAP BTP for customers?

A: SAP Data­s­phere is a com­pre­hen­sive data ser­vice with­in SAP BTP that enables a busi­ness data fab­ric archi­tec­ture. It also pro­vides mul­ti­ple ser­vices such as seman­tic mod­el­ing, data man­age­ment, data lake, or SAP Busi­ness Ware­house bridge that cus­tomers may or may not use depend­ing on their busi­ness needs. 

SAP Data­s­phere is the evo­lu­tion of SAP Data Ware­house Cloud that sim­pli­fies orga­ni­za­tions’ data land­scape and pro­vides seam­less access to busi­ness-ready data with aug­ment­ed man­age­ment, estab­lished busi­ness seman­tics, and flex­i­ble inte­gra­tion. Cus­tomers can com­bine data from SAP and non-SAP sources across an organization’s most impor­tant data sources. 

We now also intro­duce a new open ecosys­tem of strate­gic part­ner­ships with Con­flu­ent, Col­li­bra, Data­bricks, and DataRo­bot, allow­ing orga­ni­za­tions to cre­ate an inte­grat­ed, seman­ti­cal­ly rich data archi­tec­ture that secure­ly com­bines SAP and non-SAP data no mat­ter where it resides across cloud providers, data ven­dors, and on-premises. 

Q: From what you’re say­ing, one of the major evo­lu­tions of SAP has been toward cre­at­ing a more open sys­tem, rather than a closed sys­tem, with its appli­ca­tions and their range of SAP and non-SAP integrations.

A: That’s exact­ly right. We under­stand our cus­tomers’ real­i­ty, and we want to be much more open in terms of tech­nol­o­gy part­ner­ships and ecosys­tem part­ners and hav­ing part­ners pro­vide val­ue-added capa­bil­i­ties on top of BTP. We already have more than 1,500 part­ners across 25 indus­tries using BTP to build apps, automa­tions, or inte­grate sys­tems. Our online com­mu­ni­ty is steadi­ly grow­ing and has more than 400,000 month­ly users, tak­ing advan­tage of learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and best prac­tices from SAP and non-SAP experts. 

For more insights, check out our SAP BTP and SAP S/4HANA con­tent collections.