As companies look for ways to stand out in an increasingly crowded market, they must use every tool at their disposal to improve agility and drive innovation. To help organizations in this pursuit, SAP offers users dozens of options to bolster their business performance through the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). SAPinsider recently sat down with Iver van de Zand, SAP’s CTO for SAP BTP, to learn more about SAP BTP, discover key use cases for its solutions, and share best practices for pushing innovation.

How SAP BTP Bolsters Businesses

The rate of change within the technological landscape is fast and it is only going to get faster. SAP offers its Business Technology Platform as a springboard for agility and innovation. This allows companies to maintain the agility needed to continually evolve, while also ensuring that all organizations have a holistic view of their entire SAP landscape. “SAP BTP plays only two games. First, it integrates. It makes sure that our core applications, like SAP S/4HANA and Ariba, integrate with each other, as well as with external technologies like Salesforce or WorkDay. The second thing is it allows our customers to innovate on top of the core applications, whether that is building a dashboard or building an application or putting AI in it,” said van de Zand As SAP landscapes grow and expand, companies must ensure that they are maintaining an environment with end-to-end connectivity. This is where SAP BTP really shines, maintaining a close connection between on-premise functionality and innovation in the cloud. “That integration aspect of SAP BTP is applicable to almost every customer. Of course, we are a cloud-first company, but I don't know too many customers who have nothing on-premise anymore. Whether it is because of a budget or a custom build, some things have needed to stay on-premise. But companies still want to innovate in the cloud. Typically, they use modern technology from us and they still use SAP Datasphere together with SAP Business Warehouse, so they need to integrate those,” said van de Zand. He went on to say that more and more customers no longer require regular integration. Rather, they are after integration in real-time, also known as “event-driven integration.” One event can trigger many follow-up processes, executing multiple functions and making the process much simpler.

Delivering High-quality Data with Context

Data is the foundational underpinning of every advanced capability that organizations are excited to begin utilizing. This data must maintain its original context in order to be useful. When users create an order in SAP S/4HANA, all that context is still there – tables, relations, access controls, security, and more. However, companies that export the data to a data lake will soon find that context is gone. “What we have seen in the last eight years is that nine out of 10 customers I talked to all built data lakes, whether that is in AWS, Azure, or Google Big Query. Everybody does that. The customers go to SAP S/4HANA or to BW/4HANA, they search for the export button, and they export all the data. Then the project teams have to rebuild the relations, the hierarchies, the business logic, which was already in there before. What is so special about SAP Datasphere is that SAP customers use it to access their own ecosystem, whatever they do, the data does not move and the context remains, so you don't have to rebuild it,” said van de Zand. With that context maintained, SAP users can overhaul their planning processes with business data fabric. SAP BTP also allows users to access insights wherever their data resides, making planning faster, simpler, and more accurate. Additionally, as SAP organizations move from multiple SAP ECC instances to one SAP S/4HANA deployment, SAP BTP can be a useful tool for archiving data. This saves valuable time and resources while also ensuring that SAP users can maintain a clean core. With high-quality data easily accessible throughout the landscape, SAP users can focus on accelerating and innovating through the use of AI and advanced planning tools.

Leveraging AI

With the emergence of AI, companies are on the lookout for ways to implement this exciting new technology. Yet its adoption has been uneven. Some organizations are hesitant to leverage a new technology they do not understand, while others are caught in the hype cycle and pushed to infuse AI into their workflows without first understanding its business case. “If I want AI to be adopted and consumed, it has to have a use case. It is like if I buy someone a new Lamborghini and he doesn't like sports cars, he's not going to drive the thing. Some people think that AI is going to solve every problem that they have. But the reality is sometimes disappointing because it's not going to run the business for you. But it helps you run your business better,” said van de Zand. SAP BTP offers users the ability to add in AI in a way that is measured and scalable, infusing applications with enhanced capabilities. SAP BTP features business-specific AI models that are pre-trained and ready to deploy. Users can also manage the entire machine learning lifecycle through the SAP AI Launchpad, offering transparency to all users within an organization.

What this Means for SAPinsiders

Integration is the key to innovation – For nearly a decade, SAP BTP has helped users to integrate their data across the entire SAP landscape, then innovate the way they work on top of that data. Without trustworthy data, SAP users cannot leverage advanced capabilities. SAP BTP provides the ability to maintain not only the data, but also the crucial context surrounding it. Clean core customization – For many years, SAP users customized their own environments, which led to cluttered cores that bogged down ERP instances. Users can now leverage SAP BTP’s low-code and pro-code solutions to build apps more quickly while maintaining a clean core. Advanced capabilities – SAP BTP is a springboard for innovation. Users can find automation and AI solutions to automate workflows, perform advanced analytics, and optimize applications – all managed from one centralized location.