The SAP BTP Experts Channel is for anyone responsible for the platform's configuration, implementation, or ongoing support. Learn more about the capabilities of this powerful suite of tools and extensions that can help your organization increase agility and business value.

It combines application development, data and analytics, intelligent technologies, and automation in one unified environment. All are running on significant cloud infrastructure managed by SAP.

Integration Suite

The solutions companies deploy for customer relationship management, financial management, and enterprise resource planning can be robust, but they only work if you connect them. The SAP Business Technology Platform provides the integration tools and prebuilt content to connect on-premise and cloud applications and processes.

In most IT environments, multiple vendors, systems, and platforms are used to run business processes. These systems can be on-premise or in the cloud, creating an increasingly complex IT landscape. The different systems may use different technologies, and they may operate on different architectures. This complexity leads to incompatibilities and inefficiencies.

With the SAP Business Technology Platform, you can connect your systems, data, and applications to make your business run more effectively. This enables your employees to complete their daily tasks faster and more efficiently while giving you valuable time to innovate, according to SAPinsider.

The platform supports event-driven communication with a lightweight, simple, secure middleware solution connecting your applications through standard interfaces. These middleware tools allow applications to send brief messages to an event broker when a new business process starts or when a business process stops. The event broker then makes these messages accessible to other applications. This enables you to build and integrate complex application scenarios, including those that involve your trading partners.

Extension Suite

In this pillar, SAP delivers products for application development, business process automation, and AI. The extension suite enables customers to extend their SAP and other systems (SAP and non-SAP) by leveraging various preconfigured tools and services for the different application areas.

Customers must manage complex IT landscapes that combine on-premise and cloud solutions across multiple vendors and platforms. They also need help with time-consuming and costly manual processes for gathering and consolidating data for reporting, analytics, and predictions. To address these challenges, it is necessary for companies to quickly and easily add new applications and automate business processes to enable differentiation and accelerate value creation.

SAP offers the Extension Suite to help customers achieve these goals, including a multi-cloud solution for business application developers and users. It also includes tools for creating and running cloud-native extension applications that can be rapidly deployed and managed with atomic function code. This approach allows developers to build, test and deploy low-code apps for various use cases, including process automation and digital experience improvements.

The Extension Suite also enables customers to adapt their SAP systems to the dynamic business environment without significant effort through side-by-side extensions. This capability enables software to follow the business logic while keeping the core clean and facilitating easier upgrades.

Side-by-Side Extensions

The Side-by-Side Extensibility concept lets you extend your SAP system with external applications. These run on the SAP Business Technology Platform and communicate with your SAP S/4HANA Cloud system using standard communication scenarios or custom ones based on your business objects.

This approach suits complex adaptions such as data consolidation from multiple systems or integrating new functions. It also supports your flexibility during times of fast-changing business processes. It provides more freedom of expression than in-app extensions and can be implemented in various programming languages. However, ABAP is preferred for this scenario.

By separating the application from the core ERP system, you follow the SAP principle of keeping the core clean. This minimizes the impact of updates on your processes and reduces maintenance costs. Furthermore, the resulting decoupled solution can be easily migrated to a different SAP S/4HANA cloud variant.

The application can be accessed via a dedicated endpoint, which uses APIs and events designed specifically for the extension. The resulting application has its life cycle and can be deployed on a separate system, for example, in a private cloud, avoiding the risk of compromising your SAP S/4HANA Cloud system. This makes it the ideal solution for proxy or convenience applications, which diverse target groups use to support business processes.

Integration Services

In today's rapidly changing markets, differentiation through differentiation is crucial to success – and that requires companies to change their business processes flexibly. 

Several SAP integration and interface technologies are available on the SAP Business Technology Platform to enable you to connect your IT systems seamlessly, efficiently, and agilely. You can build customization accelerators, integrate with different applications, and leverage various API management capabilities to protect and monitor your integration architecture.

This pillar also includes powerful, intelligent technologies that help you automate structured and unstructured business processes and create flexible workflows without coding. It enables you to work more effectively across departments with business-context-oriented data analysis solutions.

For example, with SAP Conversational AI, you can create world-class chatbots that understand human language and make it easy to personalize interfaces. In addition, you can improve enterprise data quality with SAP Data Intelligence, which combines discovery, assessment, and governance capabilities into one solution.