Today cloud technology is not just benefiting businesses but the cloud has changed our lives as individuals as well. Every day, many of us are using cloud-based services. When we are using video streaming platforms to watch movies/web series, social media platforms to post photos, online storage for storing files, and online billing & shopping, all these examples show we are using applications hosted on the cloud.
The world is changing at a fast pace for businesses, forcing companies to respond quickly. Businesses need a technology platform that provides all the necessary services and products to make appropriate decisions considering innovation and transformation. SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is one such platform with which companies can accelerate processes, innovate, scale, drive business agility, and reduce costs. SAP BTP provides the technical foundation for businesses. So while starting the learning journey on the topics SAP BTP, SAP HANA Cloud, and SAP CAP Models, it is important to start with the “Introduction to SAP BTP”.
SAP BTP Introduction –
In this blog post on SAP BTP Introduction, we will cover the below points in detail.
- What is SAP BTP?
- What are the Advantages of SAP BTP?
- What are the Offerings of SAP BTP?
- What are the Use-Cases of SAP BTP?
- What are the Services of SAP BTP?
- Getting started with SAP BTP
What is SAP BTP?
Many SAP professionals still wonder what SAP BTP is and we are hearing this term many times. The full form of BTP is ‘Business Technology Platform’. Initially, this cloud platform was known as SAP Cloud Platform. In 2021, SAP rebranded it to SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
SAP BTP is a set of SAP Technologies that enables businesses to transform data into value. SAP BTP offers many solutions like databases, analytics, integration, programming tools, and data warehouses. Customers can use these solutions to fulfill their business requirements without any complexity in building the applications and maintaining any infrastructure. SAP BTP is basically a Platform as a Service (PaaS).
What are the Advantages of SAP BTP?
- SAP BTP integrates SAP, non-SAP, and third-party solutions to provide seamless data exchange between all the business processes. It enables On-premise applications, cloud-based applications, and any other processes to be seamlessly connected to the infrastructure of the service to provide real-time updates.
- Converts data into value which helps to achieve visibility in applications and data sources so as to optimize and grow the business.
- It allows organizations to take advantage of prebuilt services, data models, workflows, integration, and APIs which are available for multiple business areas.
- Always synced with the latest changes in the market and responds quickly to grab new business opportunities.
- Newest technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) embedded in the platform along with real-time analytic solutions help an organization in making more accurate decisions.
What are the Offerings of SAP BTP?
SAP BTP offers a lot of capabilities for Application Development, Automation, Integration, Data and Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence. Below are more details for each of the offerings.
Application Development –
- Application development offering of SAP BTP is a briefcase of frameworks, tools, and solutions that eases the software development of custom applications and extensions for specific business purposes.
- At different levels of development, it provides functionalities that help to increase development productivity with no-code through SAP Build or low-code in SAP BAS.
- SAP BTP provides both business and platform services that accelerate the development of cloud applications.
Automation-
- SAP Build Process Automation has made Workflow Management and Task Automation simple and fast, which fuels innovation and change adaptation.
- This simple approach helped users to build no-code, drag-and-drop tools to automate tasks and create workflows.
- Features of SAP Process Build Automation –
- Automation is made simpler with AI capabilities.
- Fast development with the help of pre-built workflows and connectors for SAP and non-SAP systems to integrate easily.
Integration-
- SAP Integration Suite is an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that allows to connect processes and integrate data across the landscape.
- It helps us to quickly integrate on-premise and cloud-based services, processes, applications, data, and events.
- SAP Integration Suite helps streamline SAP and third-party solution integrations with thousands of prebuilt integrations, Connectors, APIs, and best practices. These prebuilt integrations are managed and updated by SAP.
Database and Data Analytics-
- For SAP Storage and management is achieved by databases such as SAP HANA, SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), SAP IQ, and SAP SQL Anywhere. Data can be managed and modeled with solutions such as SAP Data Quality Management, SAP Data Intelligence, SAP Master Data Governance, etc.
- With its modern multi-cloud architecture and built-in data privacy and security concepts business users can securely access data sets and can share models.
- SAP Data Analytics facilitates new technology to handle an organization’s growing amount of data; this helps to –
- get meaningful and trusted final data to the organization.
- translate insights into actionable plans
- Analytics capabilities of SAP BTP will help to achieve business intelligence or organization planning.
- SAP BTP facilitates users to perform analytics with tools like SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP Crystal Solutions, SAP BW/4HANA, and SAP BI.
Artificial Intelligence-
- Artificial Intelligence powers the SAP Business Technology Platform by accelerating innovation, optimizing processes, and maximizing resources. AI enables intelligent decision-making by using data analytics to understand specific issues.
- AI Solutions unlock valuable insights, provide agile decisions and automate tasks using intelligent technologies like SAP Conversational AI, SAP Intelligent RPA, and SAP AI Business Services.
What are the Use-Cases of SAP BTP?
SAP Business Technology Platform is used for many use-cases like to automate procurement ordering processes, accelerate integration, create mobile apps to empower and engage your employees to be more efficient, digitize paper-based processes in SAP S/4 HANA on-premise, enhancing core ERP business processes, forecasting consumer market share with SAP HANA Cloud, plan and predict workforce demand etc.
Below are the three main use-cases for SAP BTP.
1) Data-to-Value
Today it has become vital that organizations should have a collective view across all their data sources so as to have rich insights and make real-time decisions. Because of increasing volumes of data, it’s important to have good data quality and data handling. Insightful data and the use of the latest technologies for data processing is the key to a flexible and scalable business of tomorrow. So, to get value from data, organizations must analyze and interpret it, and not just collect it.
2) Integration
Today, complex IT landscapes have on-premise and cloud systems, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, cloud providers, and third parties. So, integration is very important to enhance business operations by connecting all systems and business processes seamlessly.
3) Extensibility
Today, organizations need to stay updated and practice the latest technologies with respect to changing customer demands and new business conditions. Extensibility allows companies to build and enhance all their application investments to meet their dynamic needs and provide continual value. With SAP BTP as an underlying platform, organizations can deliver these features. With the rising amount of cloud solutions in IT landscapes, organizations need to think about extensibility and not modifications like in the old on-premise systems.
What are the Services of SAP BTP?
As of May 2023, there are 96 services available as part of SAP BTP ( to find the whole list of services click here ). These services belong to many solutions like Application Development and Automation, Data and Analytics, Integration, AI etc. Below are some of the important services –
- Cloud Foundry Runtime – This service allows the development of cloud-native applications in multiple languages as per the developer’s wish. And run these applications on SAP BTP Cloud Foundry Environment.
- SAP Business Application Studio – It is a modern and powerful development environment specialized for the efficient development of business applications for organizations. It is a web-based IDE supporting numerous development scenarios while accelerating time-to-market with development tools such as templates and wizards, graphical editors, quick deployment etc.
- SAP HANA Cloud – This service is a data platform-as-a-service that offers SAP HANA natively in the cloud. With SAP HANA Cloud, we can set up and run a data management platform and data lake, and then bind them to applications running on SAP BTP or elsewhere.
- Workflow Management – This service helps to digitize workflows, manage decisions, and gain end-to-end process visibility. It helps to configure processes in a low-code approach. It allows users to automate decision-making and configure the process flow without the involvement of IT to improve process efficiency.
- Destination – This service allows you to get the backend destination details required to configure applications in the Cloud Foundry Environment.
- Authorization and Trust Management – It helps to manage user authorizations and trust to identity providers which are user base for applications.
- HTML5 Application Repository Service – It enables central storage of HTML5 applications on SAP BTP and allows application developers to manage the lifecycle of their HTML5 applications.
- Integration Suite – It connects processes while enabling new content-rich applications to be assembled faster with less dependence on IT. Its pre-built integration packs reduce the involvement of integration experts.
- Cloud Transport Management – It helps to manage software deliverables between accounts of different environments (such as Neo and Cloud Foundry), by transporting them across various runtimes.
- Job Scheduling Service – This service is used to define and manage jobs, and tasks that run once or on a recurring schedule. It provides a web-based user interface.
- Mobile Services – This service is used to develop, configure and manage mobile applications that provide mobile access to the organization’s data. It provides App Content Life Management, Push Notifications for timely organization data updates, support for on-device storage of organization data, app security, and app monitoring.
- OAuth 2.0 – This service set up authorization and authentication based on OAuth 2.0 protocol. It is suitable for a wide range of application scenarios like web, mobile, and IoT.
- SAP Analytics Cloud – It is software-as-a-service that combines analytics and planning to translate insights into actionable plans. It can design interactive dashboards to understand analysis and take action accordingly.
Getting started with SAP BTP
There are many ways to commence your journey with SAP BTP. Below are few ways to do so –
SAP BTP Free Tier –
With the SAP Free Tier service plan, you can experiment with SAP BTP and can get hands-on development experience. This plan is excellent for those who are completely new to SAP BTP so that they can explore the use case they are interested. You can develop, test, and run in one account for your new requirements. You can easily upgrade to the paid service plan and get productive without rebuilding everything from scratch. There are some limitations for each service plan in terms of usage capacity on a monthly basis. As of May 2023, there are 60 services are available under Free Tier Services.
Pay-As-You-Go –
This is a commercial model of SAP BTP and best suited for those who want to try out new business processes with SAP BTP or are constrained by budget, as you have to pay only for what you use. So you can sign up to start using cloud services in your production environment with no upfront cost and no minimum usage requirements.
CPEA –
The Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) is a consumption-based commercial model where you pay in advance for cloud credits. You will get access to all services available under CEPA but your cloud credits will get consumed only for those services that you used.
Subscription –
In this commercial model, you have to select a fixed set of services for a fixed rate, regardless of actual consumption. It’s good for those who have specific use cases and have a specific budget. During the ongoing subscription time period, you can add additional services for an additional fee.
Conclusion
SAP Business Technology Platform with its services and products, provides a business-centric, innovative, and open platform to become an intelligent enterprise. Pillars of SAP BTP are Application Development, Automation, Data and Analytics, Integration, and Artificial Intelligence. It provides many services belonging to different solutions like Integration, Data and Analytics, Application Development, AI etc. There are many ways to get started with SAP BTP; companies benefit by being able to choose between three available commercial models as per their needs.
That’s it in the blog. Now, you can start your SAP BTP journey by registering yourself on the SAP website and creating an account on SAP BTP. In the next SAP BTP tutorial, you will learn How to Create SAP BTP Trial Account and How to Create SAP HANA Cloud Instance.
Also Enroll to »» Udemy course SAP BTP Training – From Basics to Advanced [Hands-on] to start your SAP BTP Cloud journey starting from the BTP concepts to the Development of Full-Stack Fiori Applications with CAP Model & HANA Cloud.
FAQs
1) What are the basic components of SAP BTP?
Ans – Basic components of the SAP Business Technology Platform are Application Development, Integration, Database Management and Analytics, Automation, and the Newest Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML). These are also termed as ‘Pillars of SAP BTP’.
2) What is SAP BTP Cloud Foundry?
Ans – Cloud Foundry (CF) is an open-source cloud-native platform as a service (PaaS), which allows the development of cloud applications, supporting multiple programming languages, multiple runtimes, libraries, and services. This includes application deployment, application lifecycle management, and more.
3) Does SAP BTP follow multi-cloud architecture? What does multi-cloud refer to?
Ans – Yes, multi-cloud architecture is the basis of SAP BTP. Due to its multi-cloud compatibility, Business Technology Platform allows you to choose from different infrastructures, environments, and runtimes. Multi-cloud refers to the ability to deploy the solution on any cloud infrastructure provider like Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or the SAP infrastructure.
4) What is SAP SCP vs SAP BTP?
Ans – SCP is ‘SAP Cloud Platform’ and BTP is ‘Business Technology Platform’ and they are one and the same. Initially, this cloud platform was known as SAP Cloud Platform (SCP). In 2021, SAP rebranded it to SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
5) How many services does SAP BTP offer? How many of them are free-tier services?
Ans – As of May 2023, there are 96 services available as part of the SAP Business Technology Platform. Out of them, there are 60 services available under Free Tier Services.
» Also check – Interview Questions & Answers…
• Top 20 SAP BTP Interview Questions and Answers
• Top 30 SAP CAP Model Interview Questions and Answers
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