Where SAP Business Technology Platform Fits In

WHAT IS INDUSTRY CLOUD?

With SAP’s industry cloud, we’re evolving our industry strategy to bring creative, next-generation technology to the most critical parts of an enterprise. It starts by giving customers open access to the latest industry-specific solutions from SAP and from a global network of innovators, so they can put new ideas to work with speed and agility.

HOW THE PLATFORM ENABLES INDUSTRY CLOUD APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) enables SAP’s vision of the Intelligent Enterprise. Leveraging one platform customers and partners achieve agility, business value, and continual innovation through integration, data to value, and extensibility of all SAP and third-party applications and data assets.

With an open architected and unified platform, SAP partners and customers can easily extend their IT landscapes, bridging on-premise and cloud solutions to build new functionality while safeguarding their existing investments. Bringing together data and processes, technology, functionalities, and user experience on SAP BTP, not only reduces data movement, but also preserves data integrity and reduces TCO.

Specifically, the platform provides capabilities in 4 technology areas:

• Database and data management – enabling a flexible and effective way to store, access, use, and interpret all the relevant data at the speed that business demands.
• Analytics – including market-leading planning and forecasting functionalities which facilitate rapid decision-taking on top of transactional consistency and helping our customers to become truly insight-driven.
• Application development and integration – for unrivaled speed and added business value by default when building integrations, extensions, and applications around existing SAP offerings.
• Intelligent technologies – including artificial intelligence, internet of things (IoT), and intelligent robotic process automation (RPA), tailored to business purposes in order to deliver added value in the context of real business processes.

THREE CORE QUALITIES THAT DIFFERENTIATE SAP BTP

SAP BTP aims to deliver on three core qualities that differentiates itself from other cloud platforms:

1. SAP BTP is a unified platform: it integrates all its solutions and services by harmonizing data and processes, technology, functionalities, and user experience. While there is never a one size that fits all, especially around development methodologies, this harmonization of services can prevent unnecessary data movement between different technology stacks or reduce TCO through re-use of common services.

2. Business centricity: SAP has unique industry and business process knowledge. Our industry domain expertise and SAP’s E2E process offerings are ideal references to extend vertical (industry specific) processes with a cloud native architectural approach underneath.

3. Open architecture: SAP customers need to stay agile and adapt rapidly to new business conditions or changing customer demands whilst not disrupting critical existing processes. With SAP BTP application development and business process improvement capabilities, customers and partners are empowered to build, extend, and enhance applications according to their needs.

THE CRITICAL CAPABILITIES FOR INDUSTRY CLOUD ARCHITECTS AND DEVELOPERS

With its application development and integration capabilities, SAP BTP is the natural platform choice for industry cloud applications. Whether you “just” integrate industry cloud applications with your existing system landscape, or you build and operate the industry cloud applications on the platform, the capabilities of SAP BTP help you reach your goals effectively and efficiently.

SAP BTP enables efficient application development – by anyone

• Business Analysts can quickly model and run business processes and business process variants based on graphical modeling tools
• Business application developers, who would like to focus on building application logic, but not spend time on technical topics like scaling, performance, or others can benefit from the abstraction layer that the Cloud Application Programming model (CAP) provides based on common programming languages. And specifically, for developers that have gotten to love the power of SAP’s own ABAP development language and tool set, there is also an ABAP environment in SAP BTP for cloud applications.
• Last but not least, SAP also provides tools and capabilities for cloud native developers who are familiar with container technologies.

Why wait? Join us on the Industry Cloud journey. First, achievements we have already as Industry Cloud Solutions on SAP BTP. Some examples are:

• ETM.next by BearingPoint (SAP partner): industry cloud solution for engineering, construction, and operations
• SAP Intelligent Trade Claims Management: industry cloud solutions for consumer products
• SAP Digital Vehicle Hub: industry cloud solutions for the automotive industry
• SAP Customer Activity Repository, omnichannel price and promotion service: industry cloud solutions for retail
• SAP Cloud for Utilities: industry cloud solutions for utilities
• Data-to-value scenarios: industry cloud solutions for cross-industry use
• Turning the shop floor into a smart factory: industry cloud solutions for Industry 4.Now program

Looking forward to an exciting and a successful future together!

Alexander Waeldin

(Chief Business Architect Industry Cloud Program)