With SAP’s strategy to help run the Intelligent Enterprise it becomes crucial that SAP cloud solutions can deliver an end-o-end customer experience. To achieve this, the SAP Cloud Platform plays an important role as an orchestration and integration layer for all these solutions.

It then becomes even more important that SAP cloud solutions, as well as non-SAP solutions, can easily be connected to the SAP Cloud Platform in a standard and efficient way.

Running event-driven extensions and leveraging the APIs of several solutions to create value-adding applications provides the additional features and functions our customers’ business need. With SAP Cloud Platform customers will be able to achieve this in an easy manner.

Many of our customers currently have a fragmented infrastructure, consisting of various products from different vendors. Typically called a “best-of-breed” approach, this leaves a large integration and functional gap to be filled between the solutions. At the same time many customer projects are under a tight deadline, while trying to leverage new cloud-native technologies and agile principles to achieve the faster time-to-market.

SAP Cloud Platform already embarked on the extensibility journey in 2013 and today you can create extensions for various SAP cloud solutions, i.e. SuccessFactors, C4C and S/4 HANA.

The next evolution of extensions on SAP CP

With the increasing number of SAP cloud solutions and the emergence of more and more cross-product scenarios – it becomes important to have an enterprise class, open extension framework in place on the SAP Cloud Platform.

That’s where the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory comes into the picture. Leveraging the concepts and innovations from project “Kyma”, the Extension Factory will not be a separate product, but rather an integral part of SAP CP itself, facilitating the management of connected systems and their respective extensions.

In addition to the already existing possibilities to create, develop and run extensions on the SAP Cloud Platform, the Extension Factory will add additional capabilities to help develop extensions faster:

• App registration & connection
• Easy service consumption
• APIs & eventing
• Function-as-a-Service

The additional capabilities

App connection and registration

Applications/solutions will be able to connect directly to the customers’ global account on SAP CP much easier. This includes:

• the setup of trust between applications with a global account
• the registration of application APIs, business services and events to the customers’ global account

Easy consumption of services

SAP Cloud Platform will provide a consolidated Service Catalog, which will serve as the central point for discovery and consumption of business services via Open Service Broker API standard. As a result, it’ll be much easier to consume business services coming from any system connected to SAP CP in a coherent and consistent manner.

APIs & eventing

The SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Messaging will have access to the applications registered on the SAP CP subaccount and will enable the consumption of application events. Once those events are registered on SAP CP Enterprise Messaging, other applications can subscribe and react on them.

The application APIs will be exposed via the OpenAPI standard and, once registered to an SAP CP subaccount, they are accessible to all applications in that subaccount.

Function-as-a-Service

SAP Cloud Platform Functions (available as a beta) enables customers to create small, focused and cost-efficient modules, which can react on various triggers:

• http request
• timer
• event

SAP CP Functions will be able to subscribe to all events registered in SAP Cloud Platform Messaging. For any of the triggers, a function can be written and will run on SAP CP.

Conclusions

It is important to understand that the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory is not a component that you have to buy. It’s a concept to combine various components and technologies available on SAP CP to help you create tightly-integrated, cloud-native extensions. The Extension Factory is part of the platform, not something to setup and manage – it simply works.

To better demonstrate the concepts behind the Extension Factory, collect invaluable feedback and enable partners and customers to get involved in its development: SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory lab preview is now available to customers of SAP Commerce Cloud running on Microsoft Azure.
They can enable it directly out of the SAP Commerce Cloud Customer portal administration tool, after accepting the terms and conditions of the lab preview program.

To all others: stay tuned!
The SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory will be general available, soon.

Checkout the FAQ document for SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory for questions you might have.

Best,
Rui