SAPinsider sat down with Thorsten Leiduck, SAP’s Senior Vice President and Co-Lead of the Global BTP Ecosystem, to discuss SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and its capabilities to transform businesses. Q: What is driving adoption of SAP BTP? When we talk about business transformation and how to set up the next generation of IT landscape, it’s really about the intelligent and sustainable enterprise. How do you enable that? We think there are several key components that are relevant. One is a very strong platform layer—SAP Business Technology Platform—that has core capabilities around data, data management, analytics, integration, the extensibility side, and intelligent technologies. This is basically the foundation of SAP’s intelligent enterprise framework and its application portfolio, such as SAP S/4HANA but also its industry cloud solutions. We have a process layer on top because what needs to come together are data, process, technology, and people. You need to combine those four things, and that is where we differ because we are providing the context with the data to the business process. The business process layer enables end-to-end business processes effectively and helps our customers get those enabled across the entire business network and not just within their own company, which is very crucial. Q: What advantages does the cloud have over traditional on-premise solutions? In the traditional on-premise world, what customers usually do is customize their systems by adding additional functionality directly into the core ERP system. That has some limitations because whenever you do upgrades, you basically have to update those kinds of modifications in the core systems, which slows you down and costs a lot of resources. In the cloud, you obviously have a totally different paradigm because you have an innovation cycle in the core application, which is usually bi-weekly. You don’t want to customize your cloud system because you break down the innovation cycles. Q: Can you tell us about the integration capabilities of SAP BTP? In any project you launch as a customer, you have integration requirements because you have heterogeneous environments and landscapes and need to connect people, processes, and devices. To do that effectively, you need to have various integration capabilities and methodologies. For example, I mentioned that with SAP Business Technology Platform; we have an API-driven concept that integrates with our own core solutions but also provides out-of-the-box integration capabilities that allow our customers to basically plug and play any system together effectively in order to exchange data across various systems and landscapes and also gain real-time insights across those architectures and systems. You also have event-driven scenarios where you need to build out highly customized integration capabilities and systems that can't use any out-of-the-box integration capabilities because you need to go deep into the business logic. With the integration speed that we have on SAP Business Technology Platform, we address all those requirements. We have out-of-the-box integration capabilities and provide a very professional environment for customers and employees to build out connectors that can go deep. We have an event messaging infrastructure and provide integration to corporate sites and government sites where you can effectively consume third-party information. Finally, we can also inject devices from an IoT perspective and leverage machine communication. Q: What gives SAP BTP a competitive advantage over other platforms? If you look at this from a toolset perspective, ask if you can build extension integration scenarios with other vendor products. The answer is yes. What we have done with SAP Business Technology Platform is provide unique capabilities, particularly for an SAP-centric customer environment, which means we allow them to innovate faster. We do that with basically three things. First, we provide out-of-the-box integration capabilities. As mentioned, systems across the SAP landscape could easily be connected out of the box so you can set up end-to-end processes. The second thing is business content, which is very important because in the end, when you have an analytic dashboard or any kind of process automation scenario, you need to have the specific line-of-business (LOB) or industry context. You need to have domain expertise and content in order to deliver fast time to value. On the analytics side, for example, we have thousands of prepopulated content dashboards you can consume right away as a customer. All that is enabled on the platform. The third thing is business process automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning is not being delivered as a tool. We provide specific AI scenarios that optimize our customers’ business landscapes. We can go specifically and say, “Look, here’s the process A to B. This is what your cost is; this is the time of operations.” We plug in those kinds of technologies and show the customer how they can reduce time to the outcome or lower the cost. Q: How do customers work with their partners to optimize their use of SAP BTP? One important component in the entire engagement with the customer is our ecosystem. We believe that most innovations being deployed and made available on SAP Business Technology Platform are coming from our partners. SAP is obviously an innovative company. We use SAP BTP for our own products, but we have about 23,600 partner companies. They can all innovate on this platform, so we can never match that kind of innovation for our customers. For the customer, it is a significant benefit that they can use this kind of expertise. It’s accessible to them through the SAP Store. They can effectively browse all the SAP partner solutions and can even buy them. It provides a variety of choices on specific micro-vertical requirements, or specific business process requirements can be immediately solved by using one of those partner solutions and having them running on SAP Business Technology Platform out of the box and connected to the customer’s system. Another component is RISE with SAP, a guided tour for customers on how they can enable an entire business transformation, not just a lift and shift of their ERP SAP S/4HANA system. That’s very important. When you go on the journey if you move to SAP S/4HANA, what do you have to enable? Redesign and reimagine your business processes in order to be effective. It’s not about a technical migration; it’s how you get from your stage today to an end-stage where your business is totally optimized, agile, and digitally enabled.