SAP BTP Overview for a Basis Consultant

[jaskaran_singh1991]

This blog post is created mainly for SAP Basis consultants who need to understand the basic terminologies related with the SAP BTP platform. This blog post is mainly to understand some terminologies used in the BTP world and is not written for any configuration.

 

So Lets start with

Definition and Basics

SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is an integrated offering comprised of four technology portfolios: database and data management, application development and integration, analytics, and intelligent technologies. The platform offers users the ability to turn data into business value, compose end-to-end business processes, and build and extend SAP applications quickly.

Below is a SAP standard diagram which can help to understand BTP

 

 

SAP BTP is a PaaS offering that delivers in-memory capabilities, core platform services and microservices for building and extending intelligent, as well as mobile-enabled cloud applications. It offers great flexibility in terms of the choice of the cloud vendors and applications. It has 3 main pillars

1. Integration

SAP BTP provides functionalities and technologies to connect On-Premise and cloud based applications. For the Basis consultants this is one of the most asked area where functional teams ask them for the integration of on-premise and cloud based applications.

2. Data to Value

SAP BTP helps to provide consolidated view across all data sets and help to achieve insights to make real time data. With BTP we can connect multiple data sources and all these sources can help easily to convert this data to a business value.

3. Extensibility

Extensibility allows companies to build and enhance applications, to meet customer’s needs. BTP provides a platform which helps organisations to easily build and deploy new applications on the cloud based platform.

 

With the boom of SAP cloud applications, it has become very important for Basis consultants and Developers to understand some basic terms related with BTP like Global Account, Subscriptions, Entitlement, Region and Directory. Below diagram shows how these terms are inter-related.

 

1. Service Marketplace of the BTP - It is like a App store, that provides all services and its description.


2. Entitlement - An entitlement is your right to provision and consume a resource. In other words, entitlements are the service plans that are entitled to use.


3. Quota- A quota represents the numeric quantity that defines the maximum allowed consumption of a resource. In other words, how much of a service plan you're entitled to use.

Another most important term used in BTP world is SAP Discovery Centre

In case you have a business scenario and you are looking the options how it can be implemented, SAP discovery Centre is the solution for guidance. It helps to optimize business processes as it offers the support from SAP community as well. With an engaging digital experience, SAP discovery Centre provides solutions in terms of

Missions - a step by step guidance how a business scenario can be implemented. There are many guides/missions already available for SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP BTP, S/4 HANA available for the customers.

Services - To accelerate the business application and other platform services on BTP. Multiple services are available for ABAP environment, Alert notification, compliance reporting, log services,  Automation pilot etc.

Now for the developers, SAP BTP provides multiple tools 

 

 

 

For the administrators there are different ways they can connect with SAP BTP applications and one of the most used solution is SAP cloud connector.

Below diagram helps to understand how SAP BTP application can connect with On-Premise Applications. It runs as reverse proxy between the on-premise and SAP BTP platform.

 

There are multiple benefits of using a cloud connector

Compared to the opening ports in the firewall which often gets challenging for the Basis Team members to justify to the network teams. Cloud connector helps in multiple ways

1. It supports multiple protocols like HTTP, RFC (Supports native access to ABAP systems by invoking function modules)


2. Cloud connector can help to connect on-premise as well as cloud editions of HANA database


3. Cloud connector help to propagate the identity of cloud users to on-premise systems.

 

I believe if you have not started working on BTP yet, some of the above terms explained above will help you to get started.