Maximizing Business Potential: SAP BTP & SAP S/4HANA Cloud Integration

We all know that modern businesses depend heavily on technology to drive growth, efficiency and innovation. In fact, in a recent study, Forrester Research found that companies that have a flexible technology foundation and a business operating model that can change quickly grow nearly three times faster than their industry average.

We believe that the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) will be key to unlocking the full potential of your business, with one unified environment that brings together application development, data and analytics, integration, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. It will allow your business to build new innovations faster and run them with confidence across all major cloud providers.

What Is the SAP Business Technology Platform?

Simply put, SAP BTP is a platform that brings together all the critical areas of technology that you need to accelerate innovation. This includes a unified application development environment, data and analytics, integration tools, and everything you need to take advantage of the latest machine learning and artificial intelligence innovations.

It is a comprehensive solution that provides everything you need to support new business processes and workflows and leverage your existing data and applications, whether you are a professional developer or a technology-savvy business user. To learn more about SAP BTP itself read my colleague’s blog article „SAP BTP: More than Just a Data Hub“.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud comes in different hosting options and there has been an ongoing debate about the merits of public cloud versus private cloud ERP solutions, with some businesses disregarding the public cloud option because they believe it limits their ability to customize. And that is true, to a point.

However, there are advantages to keeping a clean core ERP system. It’s essential for ensuring stable and reliable operations while being agile and innovative. It helps to future-proof your business and keep it competitive in a rapidly changing business environment. And when you need to customize to meet business requirements, using SAP BTP as the platform helps you create the capabilities you need while maintaining a clean ERP core.

Leveraging its capabilities as a platform (platform as a service), SAP BTP can be used to expand the capabilities of a multi-tenant SaaS system to address customer-specific requirements. It’s a toolbox for both developers and business users to extend the capabilities of the core ERP system through addition of custom fields, creating a custom app to extend a business process, integrating another cloud or cloud service (such as digital payments or address verification web services, etc.), and much more.

Three Big Advantages of SAP BTP

When it comes to using SAP BTP versus creating new applications on your existing on-premises or hyper-scaler hosted platform, we think SAP BTP has three big advantages:

Personalized Experiences: SAP BTP has everything you need to create personalized experiences that work instantly with your SAP applications – leveraging native integrations – and connecting with all other apps and data sources. You can digitize your unique business processes and enrich them with digital assistants, task automation, and insights from data everywhere to help users be more productive – all while delivering the same consistent experience across all devices and with your SAP applications.

Build Faster, with Business Context: SAP BTP provides more agility because – unlike some other platforms – you don’t have to stitch together disparate technology pieces and build everything from scratch. Both technology experts and business users can quickly connect processes, create interfaces, and build applications that work with your core SAP systems. Developers take advantage of both familiar tools and modern low-code development environments. And with low-code or no-code, developers and business users can more easily collaborate to reduce the backlog for the IT team.

Run with Confidence on a Trusted, Enterprise-Grade Platform: Business innovation is a serious business, and we know that many innovation prototypes never make it into production. SAP BTP allows you to innovate efficiently in the cloud without interfering with your core business operations and applications. You can move existing and new SAP application customizations and other artifacts such as data models and extractors to the cloud, simplifying maintenance and the reliability of your SAP applications. And you can work in your chosen strategic environment with an enterprise-grade platform managed by SAP that runs on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform.

So, to sum it up, we think the SAP Business Technology Platform is different and better than the alternatives, and it opens up great possibilities for enjoying the benefits of SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud while retaining the ability to tailor your environment to meet business requirements. How can we help you with SAP BTP?