SAP Cloud Platform’s Role within SAP’s Digital Platform

Part Seven in The Digital Platform Blog Series: Laying the Foundation for an Intelligent Enterprise

The law of today’s business jungle is innovation – and SAP Cloud Platform and a multi-cloud strategy give you the agility to continuously adapt.

Keeping up with the relentless pace of business innovation and the technology that fuels it can be a daunting task. With constantly shifting customer expectations and an abundance of new applications that are easier than ever to adopt, enterprise technical landscapes are transforming on an almost daily basis.

So how do SAP customers keep pace? I think my colleague Irfan Khan said it best—the key to surviving and thriving in the twenty-first century business landscape is “a compelling digital foundation that not only unifies data systems and processes, but readies customers to continuously adapt to evolving business and technology conditions.” (Read Irfan’s blog, Part One in the series.)

The SAP digital platform draws on decades of SAP business process excellence and includes the integral and unifying SAP Cloud Platform—an innovation powerhouse for the integration, extension, and creation of corporate applications. The SAP Cloud Platform is a game changer for over 13,700 customers, representing companies of all sizes and industries all over the world. Distinguished by a modular, incremental approach, SAP Cloud Platform enables small, quick integration and extension projects that deliver value in only a few short weeks, or even in just a few days. After achieving near immediate measurable benefit on smaller projects, customers are increasing the scope and coverage of SAP Cloud Platform adoption to tackle bigger and more mission-critical application services projects.

An Integration and Extension Platform Supported by Business Services

The SAP Cloud Platform covers all aspects of integration, from SAP cloud applications to on-premises landscapes (and vice versa), to most major third-party solutions. Today’s enterprise landscape reality is a hybrid one—with on-premises solutions still heavily relied upon even as both SAP and non-SAP cloud application consumption rapidly rises. Our suite of integration options, along with prepackaged integration flows and business connectivity with third-party applications and APIs, allows customers to securely connect people, processes, data, and devices both inside and outside your organization.

All organizations need to distinguish themselves from the competition, and the SAP Cloud Platform plays an outsized role in helping businesses differentiate from the pack. Whether it’s adding custom settings to a new third-party cloud application or configuring an existing on-premises solution to meet new business challenges, SAP Cloud Platform provides productive and integrated approaches to extend existing cloud or on-premises solutions and applications.

Underpinning the platform’s key integration and extension functionalities are an enriching set of business services—including Analytics, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Master Data, Orchestration, and so much more—which help create a harmonizing layer of agility that spurs intelligent business solutions based on functional logic, which then stimulate growth and innovation.

Promoting Collaboration

SAP Cloud Platform also delivers an unparalleled, much needed collaboration between IT and decision-makers within the lines of business—a long-standing dilemma in our industry that, thanks to SAP Cloud Platform, might soon be a thing of the past.

Multi-Cloud Strategy

SAP Cloud Platform is based on open standards and supports multi-cloud environments, offering complete deployment flexibility and control for any cloud infrastructure, whether from SAP or from the major hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud. Customers expect compatibility with their choice of cloud deployments, and SAP Cloud Platform delivers by focusing on integrating and extending applications, data, and processes, regardless of the backend infrastructure.

The Road Ahead

As an indispensable element of the SAP’s business technology platform, SAP Cloud Platform fuels corporate agility for quick and intelligent reactions to market conditions. Flexible integration and extension capabilities allow SAP Cloud Platform customers to integrate, extend, connect and differentiate in order to not only keep pace with the head-spinning speed of change in the digital age but also to adapt and evolve, keeping one step ahead of whatever tomorrow may bring.

What’s Next?

Keep your eyes and ears peeled for SAP Cloud Platform announcements coming your way at SAP TechEd this autumn—including ones that highlight new business services and SAP applications built from the ground up by our developers using the SAP Cloud Platform.

Learn More

Learn more about SAP Cloud Platform.