SAP BTP: An Overview of All Tools
Constant market changes demand a high level of innovation and agility from companies. The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) provides the foundation to meet these demands. It offers a wide range of cloud services to future-proof the IT landscape and enables rapid and flexible implementation of extensions and custom developments in SAP S/4HANA using modern tools.
SAP BTP is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering from SAP that allows companies to seamlessly integrate cloud services into their IT landscapes. It provides the necessary infrastructure, runtime environment, and middleware.
What Cloud Services Are Available on SAP BTP?
With its comprehensive set of cloud services, SAP BTP serves as a central platform for companies looking to modernize their IT environments and optimize their business processes. These services include tools for:
- Administration: Tools for managing cloud services and users
- Development: Low-code and pro-code tools for developing and extending applications
- Integration: Solutions for seamless integration of SAP and third-party systems
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): Tools to implement and use AI and Machine Learning (ML)
- Business Intelligence (BI): Tools for data analysis, visualization, and planning
- Database and Data Management: Solutions for high-performance data processing and storage
- Integration and Process Automation: Low-code and pro-code tools for application integration
- Security: Security services to protect data and applications
Why Should Companies Use Cloud Services?
Cloud services offer numerous advantages for building a flexible and future-ready IT landscape:
- High scalability: IT resources can be flexibly adapted to current business needs.
- Predictable costs: Companies only pay for the resources they actually use, avoiding large capital expenditures.
- Automatic updates and reduced maintenance: The cloud provider handles service maintenance and updates.
- Reliability: Redundant data centers and automatic backups ensure high system availability and resilience.
Why Is SAP BTP Particularly Relevant for SAP S/4HANA Users?
SAP BTP is especially valuable for SAP S/4HANA users because it provides the development and hosting environment for custom solutions and extensions as part of the Side-by-Side Extension approach.
To benefit from cloud-oriented system landscapes even with an SAP S/4HANA On-Premise system, future developments and customizations must be implemented in a cloud-compliant manner. Here, the Clean Core principle plays a central role, which aims to keep the core of the system clean and as close to standard as possible. Custom developments should follow the Cloud Extensibility Model.
This model is based on three main principles:
- Separation of core and extensions: Extensions are implemented either internally within SAP S/4HANA Cloud as on-stack extensions or externally as side-by-side extensions on SAP BTP.
- Use of SAP-released interfaces: Extensions must be implemented using only SAP-released APIs. Internally, Business Add-Ins (BAdIs) and CDS Views can be used; for cross-system scenarios (e.g., using the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model), OData or SOAP services are used.
- Use of cloud-ready technologies: Extensions must be developed using cloud-compliant and SAP-approved technologies. For ABAP-based cloud development, a restricted version of ABAP known as ABAP Cloud is used. ABAP Cloud allows ABAP development in the cloud and enables side-by-side extensions.
SAP BTP provides the necessary tools for managing, developing, and operating custom applications and extensions, enabling companies to take full advantage of cloud capabilities.
What Are the Benefits of the Clean Core Principle and the Cloud Extensibility Model?
By implementing customizations and extensions outside the core system, the effort and risk associated with release upgrades in SAP S/4HANA are significantly reduced. This results in improved maintainability, as custom solutions can be managed and updated independently of the core. Additionally, companies benefit from greater flexibility: they can respond more quickly to new requirements and implement innovations independently of the SAP S/4HANA system – by using SAP BTP for custom development and extensions.
