This blog is co-authored by Dan Kearnan, Sr. Director SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP and amrmele81, World Wide SAP Business Development Manager, AWS.
In a bid to transition from legacy to modern data platforms, organizations of all stripes and sizes are moving their on-premises ERP systems to the cloud. The rationale is irrefutable: moving to the cloud offers significant
IT TCO reduction benefits. However, enterprises moving to the cloud merely for TCO reduction purposes are missing significant untapped business and ROI potential.
Customers like
Zalando Payments GmbH (ZPS), leveraged the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and AWS cloud services as part of their ERP cloud transformations. The combination of SAP BTP and AWS resulted in benefits that exceeded cost reductions delivered as a result of sharing IT infrastructure using cloud virtualization capabilities. When looking at these key business benefits in detail, there are
3 that stand out that drove significant business value from the move to the cloud. Let’s look at each one in more detail.
Extend your SAP S/4HANA system while keeping the core clean
Enterprises need to stay agile and adapt rapidly to new business conditions and changing customer demands. Extending core applications allows companies to build and enhance all their application investments to meet their customer’s dynamic needs and provide continual value. Customers tell us they want to keep their ERP extensions with them as they move to the cloud. Contrary to conventional wisdom, moving your SAP systems to the cloud doesn’t mean sacrificing your ability to customize and extend your ERP business processes in return for cloud TCO reductions. With SAP BTP and AWS, you can get both cloud economic advantages and flexibility to extend and customize your ERP.
Customers moving their SAP ERP environments to the AWS cloud can leverage a wide variety of SAP BTP services to build extensions and customizations while keeping their S/4HANA and ERP digital core clean for faster and cheaper future upgrades. Specifically, customers that have invested heavily in acquiring and training in-house ABAP developers can continue to leverage these resources by directing them to the
SAP BTP, ABAP Environment services to build multi-tenant SaaS extensions directly in ABAP language and have them deployed in the . This BTP service comes with an improved ABAP language optimized for the Cloud, more efficient support for developers, better tools for administrators, and migration tools for ERP custom code.
Customers that do not have in-house ABAP development expertise still have a wide variety of options to extend their SAP environment while moving to the cloud. SAP BTP offers low code/no code services like
SAP AppGyver that allow business users to build extensions without code. SAP BTP also offers pro-code services like the
SAP Business Application Studio, and packaged business extensions like the
SAP S/4HANA Cloud for intelligent intercompany reconciliation.
SAP on AWS customer – a global biopharmaceutical company- moved from ECC to S/4HANA on AWS and built half a dozen side by side applications using SAP BTP including apps that create trails for Bill of Material changes for auditing and compliance purposes and apps that provide MRP controllers with self service capabilities to update configuration files without the need to reach out to IT.
Embed intelligence into Business Processes with AI/ML/IoT/and RPA services
Customers tell us that their move to SAP S/4HANA (RISE with SAP) is only the start of their digital transformation journey and not the end. Once customers are on SAP S/4HANA, they immediately start looking for other opportunities to imbed intelligence into their finance, supply chain, and order to cash business processes. This is where SAP BTP’s AI, ML, and RPA powered services come into play including services like the
SAP Conversational AI that allows customers to build powerful AI chatbots and connect them to SAP S/4HANA (e.g. SAP Fiori Co-Pilot) and the
SAP Document Classification that helps customers apply ML to automate the management and processing of business documents such as contracts and invoices.
SAP on AWS customers like
HPE leveraged the SAP BTP Conversational AI to integrate chatbots with SAP Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) solutions to make it more convenient for users to request authorizations and reset passwords adhering to the HPE audit Policy. – a global beverage company based out of Sydney Australia and an SAP and AWS customer – leveraged SAP BTP and native AWS IoT services to help their dairy farmers reduce milk spoilage due to temperature fluctuations by capturing IoT sensor data from their milk containers and feeding them back into SAP systems - savings hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from milk spoilage.
Delivering real-time insights to the fingertips of business users
For customers with more advanced analytics requirements, such as leveraging geospatial for mobile asset tracking or accessing SAP data that is federated across different SAP cloud solutions, SAP BTP has you covered. Customers can use the
SAP HANA Spatial BTP Service to embed GPS data into their SAP analytic and the
SAP Graph BTP service that offers enterprises a single connected and unified view of all their business data.
Zalando Payments GmbH (ZPS), uses the SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP BW4HANA, and the SAP Analytics Cloud to calculate how much its accounts are holding in third-party funds at any given time and deliver the results to a large circle of internal business users.
Chart your course to success in the cloud with SAP and AWS
SAP and AWS have delivered ground-breaking co-innovation since 2008. Increasingly, this strategic partnership is driving rapid customer value through co-innovation that leverages the complementary value across our portfolios. As RISE with SAP accelerates the customer momentum towards a cloud ERP journey, SAP and AWS are working towards a joint reference architecture to guide our customer and partners to leverage SAP BTP and AWS services in a complementary way while maximizing output and customer value. To learn more about how SAP BTP+AWS can help you accelerate your journey to the cloud, be sure to read this
short infographic. In addition, learn more about SAP and AWS’s
strategic partnership at and try out the
SAP BTP platform to get started today.
