Are you familiar with the term “bimodal IT”? Gartnerfirst coined the term “bimodal” to describe two fundamentally different yet complementary ways of working that pursue different goals.
Mode 1 focuses on stability and the integration of all types of applications that run core business processes, with an emphasis on predictability and reliability, while Mode 2 focuses on digital enterprise platforms, with an emphasis on agility and speed.
While Mode 1 and 2 have different goals, they should be considered as a whole, as both modes are fundamental and necessary for highly integrated end-to-end processes. An IT strategy fit for the digital age requires both. SAP believes that you can’t win in either world if you limit your innovations to Mode 2 only. There are two things that are important to making your IT landscape – and your business – fit for the digital age: You need to modernize your core, and beyond that, you need the technology to differentiate yourself in order to win.
To stay truly competitive, growth is just as important as staying in business. Companies need a platform that allows them to digitize their existing IP and leverage all of the capabilities they have invested in the past. They need an enterprise-ready PaaS that allows them to innovate with microservices and APIs and evolve using technology services such as integration, user experience, machine learning, connectivity between things and people – the list goes on and on.
That’s what the SAP Business Technology Platform is for: a means to digitally transform your business.
What is the SAP Business Technology Platform?
SAP Business Technology Platform is an open platform as a service (PaaS) that provides in-memory capabilities, core platform services, and unique microservices for building and extending intelligent, mobile cloud applications. The platform is designed to accelerate digital transformation by helping to quickly, easily and economically develop exactly the application that is needed – without investing in local infrastructure.
Choose your preferred development technology and start building the cloud application of your dreams. Based on open standards, the SAP Business Technology Platform offers complete flexibility and control over the choice of clouds, frameworks and applications.
We would like to introduce you to the SAP Business Technology Platform in more detail below.
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Services on the SAP Business Technology Platform
The services on the SAP Business Technology Platform cover a wide range of functionalities. These functionalities range from document management, to internationalization/globalization, to blockchain and machine learning.
However, because not every service and functionality is available in every runtime environment and hyperscaler, you should think about your use cases before choosing a runtime environment or provider. To simplify the selection, you can get suggestions based on different scenarios.
In the following I present you a selection of the services.
SAP Workflow Management
With SAP Workflow Management, companies can leveragea cohesive family of services within SAP Business Technology Platform to automate business processes, manage decision logic, and gain end-to-end process visibility. Sharing these services is used to create differentiating process extensions in conjunction with SAP and third-party applications, to orchestrate tasks and processes across the board, and to create process-oriented applications.
SAP Workflow Service
Part of this portfolio on the SAP Business Technology Platform isSAP Workflow Service. The service allows you to extend your core business processes running in S/4 HANA, Ariba, Concur, SuccessFactors, SAP Service Cloud and other third-party applications.
These extension applications allow you to adopt business process changes in a very fast, agile and non-disruptive way.
The workflow service allows users to use SAP MyInbox, a Fiori-based application, to process their tasks. It provides out-of-the-box monitoring applications that can be used to monitor deployed workflows and their instances.
The service also provides a BPMN 2.0 based business process modeling tool in SAP Web IDE and allows you to quickly create and deploy workflows. It also provides REST APIs to read, create, modify, or cancel workflow and task instances from any system.
By integrating SAP Workflow Management with SAP Conversational AI, you can leverage state-of-the-art digital support for your workflows, process cycle times, and recommendations, such as Best Next Actions.
In addition, by combining SAP Workflow Management with SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, you can reconcile both structured workflows and unstructured tasks. This can, of course, help you increase the level of automation of your operational business processes, better manage overall complexity, reduce manual effort and associated errors.
Business Services
Business Services are the product of combining SAP’s understanding of business processes and industry knowledge with embedded intelligent technologies such as machine learning and analytics. Business Services deliver content and functionality tailored to common business needs, helping you customize your solutions to meet your industry- or LOB-specific needs. Extend your cloud solutions with out-of-the-box business services and shorten your development time.
Available runtime environments
Cloud Foundry
The Cloud Foundry environment includes the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, which is based on the open source application platform managed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
You can deploy your Cloud Foundry applications in different regions, each of which represents the location of a data center. For more information on regional availability of the Cloud Foundry environment, click here.
There are a variety of buildpacks available to you, including community innovations and self-developed buildpacks. With this runtime platform, you can develop and deploy web applications that support multiple runtimes, programming languages, libraries, and services.
Neo
With the Neo environment it is possible to develop applications for HTML5, Java and SAP HANA Extended Application Services (SAP HANA XS). The UI Development Toolkit for HTML5 (SAPUI5) can also be used to develop rich user interfaces for modern web-based business applications.
The Neo environment also allows you to deploy solutions on the SAP Cloud Platform. Within the SAP Business Technology Platform, a solution consists of different application types and configurations built with different technologies to implement a specific scenario or task flow. Solutions are deployed using the Change and Transport System (CTS+) tool, the console client, or the SAP Business Technology Platform cockpit, which also allows you to monitor your solutions.
The SAP Multitarget Application (MTA) model encompasses and describes application modules, dependencies, and interfaces in an approach that facilitates validation, orchestration, maintenance, and automation of the application throughout its lifecycle.
You can deploy applications developed in the Neo environment in different SAP data centers around the world. For more information on the regional availability of the Neo environment, click here.
Extension concepts
The SAP Business Technology Platform offers a wide range of options for extending or creating applications. However, the options differ depending on the runtime environment and the hyperscaler selected.
The offer ranges from No-Code to Full-Code, from ABAP to Bring-Your-Own-Language. The choice of solution depends on the goals and capabilities in your organization.
Further information
SAP Business Technology Platform offerings are evolving very quickly to address more and more business challenges. In support, SAP staff dedicated to learning are working hard to align product development and documentation, help, and learning journeys.
SAP offers a trial version for the SAP Business Technology Platform and you can use starter scenarios that can be used to recreate a scenario step by step.
The SAP Learning Journey is an overview of various free and paid learning resources based on roles such as consultant or administrator. There are free courses in SAP’s MOOC offering – openSAP. These courses are also linked in the Learning Journey. In addition, SAP currently offers 4 different missions in the SAP Cloud Discovery Center.
In addition to these more structured learning opportunities, other materials and knowledge are available in the Developer Center, the Customer Success Portal, and the SAP BTP Community.
In conclusion, it is useful to search for knowledge in the community as well. In addition to the official SAP pages, consulting companies also publish other articles based on their experience. For example, we have published articleson the integration between SAP Business Technology Platform and Azure Active Directory.
With these sources in hand, you should be able to find the answers to most of your questions. If something is unclear, you can also use our contact form and ask us a question.
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Summary
What is the SAP Business Technology Platform?
SAP Business Technology Platform is a platform as a service (PaaS) that provides in-memory capabilities, core platform services, and microservices for building and extending intelligent, mobile cloud applications. The platform is designed to accelerate digital transformation by helping to quickly, easily and economically develop exactly the application that is needed – without investing in local infrastructure.
What services are offered on the SAP Business Technology Platform?
The services on the SAP Business Technology Platform cover a wide range of functionalities. These functionalities range from microservices for determining taxes, to databases, to workflow engines and Intelligent Robotic Process Automation.
What runtime environments does the SAP Business Technology Platform offer?
On the SAP Business Technology Platform, you can choose between the Neo environment, a proprietary environment from SAP, and the Cloud Foundry environment, an open source environment. In addition, an ABAP environment is available to you.
What are the enhancement concepts on the SAP BTP?
The SAP Business Technology Platform offers a wide range of options for extending or creating applications. However, the options differ depending on the runtime environment and the hyperscaler selected.
The offer ranges from No-Code to Full-Code, from ABAP to Bring-Your-Own-Language. The choice of solution depends on the goals and capabilities in your organization.