How does SAP BTP address our customers 3 core challenges?

Let us start by putting the SAP Business Technology platform into the context of our SAP customer’s broader landscape. At the centre of the SAP products set is the SAP Intelligent Suite, where all the SAP business applications such as SAP’s new ERP platform S/4HANA or SAP SuccessFactors fit. These applications help our customers run their end-to-end business processes.

In addition to the SAP core application and with the help of the SAP ecosystem, they deliver vertical solutions for different industries as part of the SAP industry cloud, allowing customers to mix and match the variety of solutions as needed. Furthermore, both solution areas are augmented by sustainability and experience management across process options to improve the ecological footprint of processes. They capture and manage the sentiment of consumers or employees to make the experience even better.

The foundation of all these solutions is the base for the SAP Business Technology Platform. The BTP is a unified business-centric and open data and development platform for the entire SAP ecosystem.

SAP BTP empowers the SAP ecosystem of developers, customers and partners to get value from their data by creating better integration and extending the SAP landscape to drive real-time business processes.

SAP BTP is made up of four core areas that include several SAP applications:

• Database and Data management include products such as SAP HANA Cloud or SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
• Analytics: SAP Analytics Cloud.
• Application development and integration: SAP Extension Suite and SAP Integration Suite.
• Intelligent technologies: SAP AI Business Services or SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation.

How does SAP’s BTP address our top 3 challenges of Integration, Data to Value and Extensibility?

Integration:

We continue to see that our customers have tended to go for best of breed applications, and now with the journey to the cloud, we continue to witness complex system landscapes and disconnected business processes.

Most organisations today have business processes that span everything from premise to cloud and across multiple vendors. In addition, they continue to support their legacy applications, some of which have been around since the 80s, along with various platforms and open-source technologies.

These complex environments tend to be managed with a super tight focus on integration; however, the costs to run, the increased complexity and the ever-increasing data batch window are growing, and the value of these landscapes is decreasing.

Companies look to Capgemini to help them create value from their data and embed intelligence into the business processes. Likewise, companies want us to refine and enhance their business operations along the entire value chain by connecting applications, data, and experiences across SAP and beyond.

SAP Integration Suite is focused entirely on securely connecting and integrating business processes around the SAP ecosystem with a rich set of connectors and APIs. The various capabilities and the direct integration into SAP products accelerate an organisation’s time to value in a secure, maintainable, repeatable and cloud-centric capability.

Data to Value:

This is all about creating value from data or the ability to derive insights.

For organisations to exceed in today’s global economy, acting on real-time business data becomes crucial. However, different data sources, both internal and external, structured and unstructured, and with increasing volumes continue to create challenges for our customers. This, when combined with our customer drive to become digital with a focus on modernising their ever-increasing and complex application landscape, has created a perfect storm.

Data, whilst it should be at the forefront of their digital transformation, has become a topic that is too difficult to deal with and we see customers fall back on old ways of working, replicating processes that have run their business for the past 20 years and not being hyper-focused on how data can change the way they run.

In today’s world, business processes and application systems are being enriched beyond belief through sensor data or correlated with customer experience data. Still, business processes continue to run as they always have.

So, whilst data continues to grow, the dilemma businesses face is that they struggle to use it and create any real business value.

Many organisations’ data platforms end up data swamps, failing to get any insight from their data and finding themselves in a worse position than they were ten years ago. They are also losing data as part of their digital transformation, many not considering the wealth of value they have in those old applications and choosing to delete and clean their landscape as they move to the cloud or new applications take preferences over value in the data.

SAP BTP solutions have been designed to provide a flexible, user first data management and analytics platform combined with an AI layer to help customer discover, connect, orchestrate data, with the data flows coming both internal and external. All of this has been designed with near real-time access to the data they need and combined with enabling data-driven process automation to drive the insight and value from the data back into our customer business processes.

Extensibility:

For our customers to stay relevant, they need to innovate rapidly. We have seen in the past 18 months the impact that COVID-19 has had on many organisations, many have painfully had to innovate and change their business models to adapt to a slowdown in the global supply chain, local lockdowns and now even a shortage in the distribution chain.

New companies with solid digital business models and routes to market have become a serious threat to established companies, with their innovation cycles being shorter than those established businesses.

Companies need to be empowered to build, extend, and enhance their application landscape according to their needs so they can stay relevant and rapidly realise new opportunities. With SAP Extension Suite, businesses have immediate access to prebuilt extensions, business content, be it from SAP or partners through an integrated digital marketplace.

BTP is focused on helping us as partners and our customers speed up integration, find real business value from data, and extend SAP landscapes to innovate.

SAP’s TechEd in 2021 has a major focus on the Use Cases for the BTP platform which are all referenced in this blog by Rui Nogueira.

Now that we have introduced SAP BTP, there will be a series of deep-dive blogs looking at the technologies that make up the platform, so watch this space!