Showkath Naseem
11 min readFeb 24, 2023

[Blog Series ] : Demystifying SAP BTP: A Complete Guide for Sales , Technical Professionals Alike

Hello readers!

I am excited to share my blog post on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) with you today.

In the main blog post, I have shared brief summary of SAP BTP.

The first part of Blog Series will be aimed at sales teams, focusing on how to effectively sell SAP BTP to customers.

The second part will be geared towards individuals & emphasizes the value of SAP BTP for different roles within an organization

Thank you for your support and for taking the time to read my blog post on SAP BTP.

Introduction

  • SAP BTP is an acronym for for “SAP Business Technology Platform,” which is a unified cloud-based platform offered by SAP that allows users to develop, integrate, and extend their business applications ,business processes and services or it enables organizations to build, integrate, and extend focus on Develop /Extend SAP-based applications and services quickly and in a more efficient and streamlined way.
  • In SAP BTP, the “B” stands for “Business”. The “B” in SAP BTP stands for “Business,” which emphasizes the platform’s focus on addressing business challenges and creating value for organizations.
  • In SAP BTP, the “T” stands for “Technology”.The “Technology” aspect emphasizes the importance of using advanced State-of-the-art technologies to drive innovation and achieve digital transformation.
  • The “P” stands for “Platform,” emphasizing that SAP BTP is a unified environment that allows businesses to build, run, and manage enterprise applications and extensions in the cloud.

Platform provides a range of cloud-based services and tools, including database services, analytics services, integration services, and development tools. The platform is designed to help businesses accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer needs, and gain greater agility, flexibility, and innovation capabilities.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations across various industries are continuously seeking ways to streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and drive innovation. This drive has led to an increased demand for cloud solutions and seamless integration between systems to automate complex processes and leverage emerging technologies. SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) emerges as a comprehensive offering from SAP, addressing these requirements and providing a holistic approach to solution development and system extension. With a focus on minimal effort, reduced costs, and faster time to market, SAP BTP empowers organizations to concentrate on their core business functions while leveraging a robust portfolio of solutions and services. In this context, let’s explore a few real-time examples where SAP BTP can be utilized to create impactful use cases.

Scenarios

SAP Use Case:

#1) Sales Automation

A company using SAP Sales Cloud as their CRM system wants to automate their sales processes and enhance productivity. With SAP BTP, they can leverage the integration capabilities to connect Sales Cloud with other systems such as ERP, marketing automation tools, and external data sources. By utilizing BTP’s orchestration and workflow services, the company can automate complex sales processes, enable seamless data exchange between systems, and gain real-time insights into customer interactions.

#2) HR Employee Self-Service

A company running SAP SuccessFactors as their HR management system aims to provide self-service capabilities to their employees. With SAP BTP’s application development and extension services, they can build a custom employee portal or mobile application. This application allows employees to access and update their personal information, submit leave requests, view pay stubs, and access learning resources. By leveraging BTP’s authentication and integration services, the company ensures secure data exchange between SuccessFactors and the employee self-service application.

#3) Customer Service Chatbot

A company using SAP Service Cloud wants to enhance their customer service experience by implementing an intelligent chatbot. With SAP BTP’s conversational AI services, they can build a chatbot that integrates with Service Cloud and provides personalized responses to customer inquiries. The chatbot can handle common service requests, provide self-service options, and escalate complex issues to human agents when necessary. By leveraging BTP’s natural language processing and machine learning capabilities, the company improves customer satisfaction and reduces the load on their support team.

Non-SAP Use Case :

#1) IoT-enabled Supply Chain Management

A logistics company wants to optimize their supply chain operations using IoT technology. They have various IoT devices embedded in their fleet of vehicles to track location, monitor temperature, and measure fuel consumption. With SAP BTP’s IoT services, the company can securely collect data from these devices, perform real-time analytics, and integrate the insights into their existing supply chain systems. This enables them to proactively manage inventory, improve route planning, and ensure the integrity of goods during transportation.

#2) E-commerce Integration

An e-commerce company wants to streamline their operations by integrating their online store with their back-end systems, such as inventory management and order processing. With SAP BTP’s integration services, they can connect their e-commerce platform with SAP and non-SAP systems, enabling real-time data synchronization. This integration ensures accurate inventory levels, seamless order fulfillment, and consistent customer experiences across channels. The company can leverage BTP’s monitoring and alerting capabilities to proactively address any integration issues and ensure smooth operations.

#3) Financial Analytics

A financial institution wants to perform advanced analytics on their transactional data from various sources, including their SAP and non-SAP systems. By utilizing SAP BTP’s data and analytics services, they can integrate these disparate data sources, create a unified data model, and leverage advanced analytics tools like SAP Analytics Cloud. This enables them to gain real-time insights into financial performance, detect anomalies, and make data-driven decisions for risk management and strategic planning.

Is SAP BTP is Iaas or PaaS or SaaS ?

A simple answer to this question is SAP BTP is not strictly classified as IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS,As such, SAP BTP can be seen as a combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) models. SAP BTP provides a range of cloud-based services and tools, which is typical of a SaaS model. It also provides a runtime environment, which is typical of a PaaS model. Finally, it provides a cloud infrastructure & environment for applications and extensions that businesses build, run, and manage in the cloud., which is typical of an IaaS model.

SAP BTP is a Hybrid Cloud Platform offers win-win situation

SAP BTP is a hybrid cloud platform that combines the best aspects of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS to provide businesses with a complete and unified environment for building, running, and managing enterprise applications and extensions in the cloud & offer opportunity to build mutually beneficial solution for businesses and cloud providers alike.By using SAP BTP’s hybrid cloud platform, businesses can leverage the strengths of both environments, without having to compromise on security, compliance, or performance.

SAP BTP offfers both private and public cloud environments. Private clouds offer businesses greater control and security over their data and applications. On the other hand, public clouds provide greater scalability and flexibility, with access to a wider range of services and resources.

SAP BTP is an open platform that allows businesses to leverage other hyperscaler vendors such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud to complement the services provided by SAP.

In addition to this, SAP itself also utilizes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings from hyperscalers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure to provide the underlying cloud infrastructure for its own applications and services. This allows SAP to leverage the scalability and cost-efficiency of these cloud platforms, while also providing customers with the flexibility to choose the cloud vendor that best meets their specific needs.

It allows them to expand their services and reach new customers. By partnering with SAP, cloud providers gain access to a broader customer base, including those businesses that prefer a private cloud environment, and those that require greater control and compliance.

Moreover, SAP’s hybrid cloud platform also provides cloud providers with greater flexibility in terms of service delivery, as they can now offer a wider range of deployment options, including on-premise, private, and public cloud environments. This, in turn, enables cloud providers to better serve the needs of their customers, by providing them with a range of options that suit their specific business requirements.

Overall, SAP BTP’s hybrid cloud platform is a win-win solution for businesses and cloud providers alike. By combining the strengths of private and public cloud environments, businesses can take advantage of the benefits of both, while also addressing their unique business needs. At the same time, cloud providers benefit from SAP’s hybrid cloud platform, by expanding their services and reach, and gaining greater flexibility in terms of service delivery. By leveraging SAP’s hybrid cloud platform, businesses and cloud providers can unlock mutual benefits, enabling them to compete more effectively in today’s rapidly changing marketplace.

This strategy commonly known as a multi-cloud strategy, which is an approach to cloud computing that involves using multiple cloud services from different cloud providers.

A multi-cloud strategy offers several benefits, including:

  1. Flexibility: By using multiple cloud providers, businesses can choose the best services and tools from each provider to meet their specific needs. This allows businesses to optimize their cloud infrastructure for different workloads, applications, and services.
  2. Resilience: A multi-cloud strategy can help businesses avoid downtime and service disruptions by providing redundancy and failover capabilities. If one cloud provider experiences an outage or service disruption, the business can quickly switch to another provider to maintain service availability.
  3. Cost Savings: By using multiple cloud providers, businesses can take advantage of cost savings opportunities, such as discounts, promotions, and pricing differences. This can help businesses reduce their overall cloud infrastructure costs.
  4. Innovation: A multi-cloud strategy can provide businesses with access to a wider range of innovative services and tools, which can help them stay competitive and differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

In a win-win situation, both the cloud providers and the businesses benefit from a multi-cloud strategy. Cloud providers benefit from increased customer loyalty, improved service utilization, and the ability to cross-sell their services. Businesses benefit from the flexibility, resilience, cost savings, and innovation opportunities that a multi-cloud strategy provides.

Overall, a multi-cloud strategy can help businesses to optimize their cloud infrastructure, improve their resilience and agility, and stay competitive in today’s rapidly changing business landscape.

How organizations can benefit from SAP BTP

  • SAP BTP brings several advantages to organizations aiming to accelerate their digital transformation and stay competitive in the market
  • First, the platform allows for building and deploying custom applications and services that are tailored to specific business needs, improving processes, increasing productivity, and reducing costs.
  • Second, SAP BTP offers integration capabilities, which helps to improve data visibility and streamline business operations.
  • Third, SAP BTP provides advanced analytics and data management capabilities, enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions and gain valuable insights into their operations.

The platform empowers organizations to respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer needs, driving digital transformation initiatives and fostering a culture of innovation.

  • Simplified Solution Development

organizations are driven to develop solutions with minimal effort, reduced costs, and faster time to market. They aim to avoid allocating resources to tasks like landscape setup, system installation, configuration, and maintenance. SAP BTP, an offering from SAP, caters to these requirements by providing a comprehensive portfolio of solutions and services under one umbrella. This integrated approach enables organizations to build new cloud solutions or extend their existing SAP systems seamlessly. By leveraging SAP BTP, businesses can prioritize their core operations while SAP takes care of the necessary resources.

  • Cost and Resource Optimization

SAP BTP offers a cost-effective solution for organizations as it eliminates the need for extensive resource allocation towards infrastructure setup and maintenance. By utilizing the platform’s services and solutions, businesses can reduce expenditure associated with tasks like system installation and configuration. With SAP BTP, organizations can streamline their processes, lower operational costs, and allocate resources more efficiently, allowing them to focus on strategic objectives and innovation.

  • Accelerating Digital Transformation

Designed to facilitate digital transformation initiatives, SAP BTP empowers organizations to respond swiftly to evolving market conditions and customer demands. The platform enhances agility, flexibility, and innovation capabilities, enabling businesses to adapt and thrive in a dynamic business landscape. By leveraging SAP BTP’s comprehensive suite of solutions and services, organizations can accelerate their digital transformation efforts, unlock new opportunities, and drive sustainable growth. The platform serves as a catalyst for innovation, providing the necessary tools and resources to stay ahead of the competition and meet customer expectations in the digital age.

Overall, SAP BTP is a powerful platform that streamlines operations, provides insights into business operations, and creates custom solutions, allowing businesses to compete more effectively in today’s marketplace. By leveraging the power of SAP BTP, organizations can improve their agility, flexibility, and innovation capabilities, and respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer needs.

In order to provide tailored information to different audiences, this blog series will be divided into two parts.

Blog Post #1 :

The first part will be aimed at sales teams, focusing on how to effectively sell SAP BTP to customers.

Here is a link :

https://medium.com/@iamshowkath/demystifying-maximizing-the-potential-of-sap-btp-an-essential-guide-for-business-342b0a50b468

Blog Post #2 :

The second part will be geared towards individuals & emphasizes the value of SAP BTP for different roles within an organization involved in the decision-making process of an organization’s technology strategy, including IT managers, CIOs, technology executives, developers, technical professionals, business analysts, and functional consultants.

Here is a link :

https://medium.com/@iamshowkath/demystifying-maximizing-the-potential-of-sap-btp-an-essential-guide-for-business-342b0a50b468

Stay tuned for both parts of the series, as we explore the world of SAP BTP and its many advantages.I am trying to providing a clear, straightforward explanation of SAP BTP and how to use it to its fullest potential.

Our SAP community has numerous tutorials , videos, blogs

Find out how to build software applications, side-by-side extensions, and integrations from and to cloud applications by exploring SAP’s free learning content on SAP BTP. It is made for both integration designers and extension developers from all levels of expertise and will help you stay up to date with the latest SAP BTP innovations. Check out even more role-based learning resources and opportunities to get certified in one place on SAP Learning site.

Conclusion:

SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) serves as a catalyst for organizations aiming to optimize their operations, drive innovation, and accelerate their digital transformation. By offering a comprehensive portfolio of solutions and services under one umbrella, SAP BTP enables organizations to build new cloud solutions or extend existing SAP systems with minimal effort, reduced costs, and faster time to market. With its focus on resource optimization, integration capabilities, and agility, SAP BTP empowers businesses to stay ahead in today’s competitive landscape. By leveraging the advantages of SAP BTP, organizations can unleash their potential, respond to evolving market dynamics, and achieve sustainable growth in the digital age.

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Showkath Naseem

IT Professional with Expertise in SAP Cloud Technologies, Full Stack Development, Architect , Technical Evangelism,QA & Technical Writing. Focus on SAP BTP