More intelligent enterprises are using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to get a leg up on their competition and adapt to abrupt market changes, such as the COVID-19-inspired shift to remote work. This has led to the uncontrolled proliferation and rapid turnover of enterprise SaaS apps. According to the 2020 SaaS Trends report by Blissfully, the overall spending per company on SaaS apps increased 50% in 2020 compared to 2018. The Blissfully report, which I cited in a previous blog post, found the number of duplicate app subscriptions increased by 80%, and orphaned app subscriptions jumped almost 100%. The explosion in SaaS app use has increased cloud complexity. This complexity has created management, cost, integration, and security challenges for IT teams. To address these issues, many enterprises are modernizing their IT systems by automating operations using intelligent technologies, according to the SAP Insights’ report The Interconnectors: A New Mindset for Value Creation where we surveyed 2,800 global organizations. These enterprises see increased investment in digital technology and skills as the most essential factor in handling app proliferation and increasing revenue and profit. But only 17% of respondents said they are integrating experience and operational data across their businesses. The report uncovered that leading integrators engage in systems thinking, link customer and employee experience with operations using data, identify signals and patterns in their data using intelligent technologies, and improve data flow and remove silos through IT modernization. In the current environment of rapid change, enterprises need to develop an integrated view across all apps, data, and other assets to gain insights and make real-time decisions.

Integration Challenges and Cloud Complexities

As I’ve said before, the intelligent enterprise needs to be integrated across processes and lines of business and be driven by data. While the strategic value of data and integration grows and cloud-to-cloud integrations increase, so does the complexity of SAP customers’ enterprise landscape (Figure 1). Figure 1: Customers' Enterprise Landscape SAPinsider’s SAP Integration Landscape report (based on 152 community members surveyed in July and August of 2021) showed that the average number of solutions integrated into respondents’ ERP platforms jumped from seven to 11 between 2020 and 2021, with 13% of companies saying they are integrating at least 20 solutions. These include SAP and non-SAP apps for human resources, customer relationship management, and marketing. Given the central role and reach of SAP landscapes, it is no surprise that integrating non-SAP and SAP applications is a clear need, as indicated by 90% of SAPinsider’s respondents. Additionally, customers’ integration strategies are falling short. Fewer than 10% of respondents said that their current integration strategy is fully meeting their needs, while one-third said that their strategy was mostly meeting their needs, and 46% said it was only partially satisfying their needs.

Role of Partners

To address these challenges, organizations are leveraging innovation and technology to improve their agility, and view integration as the best way to achieve this goal. SAP and its service, implementation, reseller, and software partners bring innovation, technology, and integration to SAP customers globally. SAP partners play a crucial role in addressing integration challenges and finding solutions. Partners can assist SAP customers by developing solutions that work across hybrid landscapes, linking lines of business and accessing data domains from finance, assets, and products to customers, vendors, and employees. SAP enables customers to connect their data and business processes to overcome fragmentation and expand integration by working closely with partners and committing to a unified technology platform. This collaboration has led to the widespread integration of SAP technology in the global economy. At SAP, we believe we have an obligation to our customers, who generate 87% of total international commerce ($46 trillion). With more than three-quarters of the world’s transactions touching an SAP solution, we owe it to our customers to improve the level of integration between SAP and non-SAP technologies, so they run better, but also so that the global economy runs better. Close collaboration with our partners helps us improve service to our customers, including connecting lines of business and tapping into data domains and products to link customers, vendors, and employees spanning diverse hybrid landscapes.

SAP Business Technology Platform

With SAP Business Technology Platform, partners and customers can build, integrate, and extend business applications with a combination of technologies for database and data management, analytics, application development and integration, and intelligent technologies. Imagine the power of addressing challenges with in-depth insight and fast access to business data and processes. Instead of focusing on technical building blocks, organizations can concentrate on delivering strategic outcomes to enhance customer value. SAP Business Technology Platform enables SAP to deliver on its commitment to improve IT integration for customers and partners (Figure 2). Figure 2: SAP Business Technology Platform In a nutshell, SAP Business Technology Platform helps companies achieve agility, business value, and innovation through integration, data value creation, and extensibility of SAP and third-party application and data assets. The platform includes hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications. SAP Business Technology Platform enables customers and partners to extend and connect existing solutions, such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Ariba using platform services like the SAP HANA Cloud database, SAP Integration Suite, SAP Extension Suite, and SAP Analytics Cloud, with new development services and low-code/no-code capabilities.

SAP Integration Suite and SAP Extension Suite

Two critical components of the platform’s capabilities are SAP Integration Suite and SAP Extension Suite. They simplify application integration and extension development and help partners realize faster time to value with lower development risks. SAP Business Technology Platform services, including database and data management, analytics, application development and integration, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, help turn data into business value. A blend of these services sets the stage for optimized efficiency and resilience by providing a unified and consistent user experience and automated processes. SAP has mapped business processes that span traditional domains and system silos to include crucial requirements of intelligent enterprises. These processes are design to operate, lead to cash, and source to pay. Part of SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Integration Suite bridges fragmented systems and processes for flexible and agile operations. The suite includes more than 1,800 pre-built integrations, 2,100 application programming interfaces (APIs), and 160 third-party connectors. The suite connects and contextualizes processes and data while enabling new content-rich applications to be assembled faster and with less dependence on IT. It safeguards and future-proofs the investments of on-premises customers and helps them with the transition to the cloud. Figure 3: Business Processes and the Intelligent Enterprise Delaware Consulting International, a global consulting firm operating in 12 countries, reported in a case study published by SAP that it used SAP Integration Suite to integrate SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud and expand its cloud business by 487% in 2019. Using SAP Integration Suite, Delaware Consulting said it was able to optimize implementation of its design-to-operate process, monitor its application lifecycle management, implement secure onboarding of software partners, detect potential errors before they impacted business users, centralize information relevant for application support, implement single message flows that help reduce integration layer complexity, and leverage SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology to govern its integration strategy. Complementing SAP Integration Suite is SAP Extension Suite, which enables development application extensions for innovation across heterogeneous IT landscapes. SAP Extension Suite supports partners in moving away from extensions that involve direct customization of SAP solutions. This reduces complexity, enables an easy transition to the cloud, and provides the benefits of regular SAP updates. Consider another customer example, Uniper. In a case study published by SAP, the energy firm reported that it used SAP Business Technology Platform to build a cloud-first architecture and new business models and streamline operations across the enterprise. As a result, the company said it was able to cut time spent on plant inspections by 50% and increase data entry for job requisitions tenfold. As part of that effort, Uniper reported employing SAP Extension Suite to support end-to-end processes, linking mobile apps and robotic process automation.

Other SAP Business Technology Platform Capabilities

SAP Business Technology Platform also employs SAP One Domain Model, a standard data model that determines the format for attributes of the business objects in SAP systems. This can help customers get a harmonized view of data in a business context. SAP is enhancing SAP One Domain Model to become more extensible and accessible. The goal is to have SAP One Domain Model serve as the common language of integration between apps and supporting app extensibility. SAP Business Technology Platform offers semantic data management capabilities using SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, and SAP Data Intelligence Cloud. These aim to break down data silos, providing unified access to enterprise data. A semantic content layer can help organizations store, process, use, and make sense of data. With these capabilities, users can access data from various SAP solutions with less integration effort. SAP is also streamlining the partner experience by eliminating multifaceted revenue share models, contracts, and fee structures and shifting to a unified approach that ends one-off partner integrations and uneven contributions to the ecosystem. These changes will help reduce the fragmentation of business processes and promote a consistent cloud user experience by enabling partners to build their integrated solutions on SAP Business Technology Platform. In addition, SAP Store provides customers with access to a business-to-business (B2B) marketplace that brings partner-built digital solutions across product lines and industries into customers’ hands. The digital marketplace is the gateway for connecting with the SAP sales team, which promotes partner apps and assists in SAP Store deals. Partners can connect with more than 440,000 SAP customers to deliver apps and provide integration to reach new market segments and geographies. The current business environment forces many enterprises to think outside the box, define new business models and processes, and accelerate innovation and digital transformation to operate in a more dynamic and agile fashion. Integrated IT platforms like SAP Business Technology Platform can help companies with these efforts by unifying an increasingly diverse IT landscape and bringing together apps, processes, and data to reduce costs and maximize flexibility and profits

What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?

• Get a handle on the apps operating in your environment. Decentralized app procurement can provide flexibility to business units in a remote work environment. But this approach can lead to siloed business solutions and data, in addition to duplicate and unused apps that waste money and increase security risks for your company. Give IT a role in any app procurement so it can monitor, streamline, and secure those apps.
• Integrate apps, data, processes, devices, and people. To avoid a fragmented IT environment that burdens the IT team and opens your organization to security threats, take steps to integrate your IT environment. Companies that are leaders in integration engage in systems thinking. Be one of those leaders.
• Consider using an integrated platform like SAP Business Technology Platform. This can help bring order to the app and process chaos that you may be experiencing with accelerated SaaS adoption and the abrupt shift to remote work. Two components of the platform, SAP Integration Suite and SAP Extension Suite, simplify application integration and extension development for SAP partners and customers. Such a platform can help turn apps and data into business value. SAP Business Technology Platform can help you be an integration leader by linking customer and employee experience data with operations data, identifying patterns in your data using intelligent technologies, improving data flow, and removing data silos.