A Look “Under the Hood” at SAP Business Technology Platform [XP102]

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello and welcome. My name is Stephanie and I'm a product manager for SAP Business Technology Platform. Today, I would like to provide you a look under the hood at SAP Business Technology Platform. In our session, I will give you an overview on the SAP Business Technology Platform and its cloud capabilities. We will also have a look at the free tier model for SAP BTP and the SAP Discovery Center.

So let's start to get a little bit more clear on what is an intelligent, sustainable enterprise. We bring together our comprehensive portfolio of solutions and technology to cover all your business processes. It starts with the end-to-end industry specific business processes, which are supported by the different business applications underneath. The Business Technology Platform is the technology component that provides the foundation for building an intelligent, sustainable enterprise. But why is that so important and what is SAP's role in there? Let's go ahead and do a quick reality check and see how an end-to-end business process looks like.

Therefore, I took the example of the lead-to-cash process, which spans across different line of businesses and different applications. This will show the challenges you can overcome with our SAP Business Technology Platform. In this example, it becomes super clear how several different solutions each of them supporting one crucial piece of the puzzle. For example, SAP Marketing Cloud is important to attract customers, whereas SAP S/4 HANA is used to fulfill orders and collect payments. Also the SAP Customer Data Cloud is there to store all necessary customer information. Here you see that each step plays an important role and it's making sure lead-to-cash within a company works seamless without any breaks in the flow.

But what about innovation? What happens when we start talking about intelligent business processes including, for example, new technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence? Is that developed in silos or leveraging one common platform? That means even though each of these applications offer its own business purpose and the real value can be achieved if there is a connection, a clue that makes sure the pieces are all line up. Integration of all our business processes, data, and application is key, it's the first step in any digital transformation project. We have a lot of different solutions, which you can see here. But how do we bring them all together? Applications needs to be integrated together as well as their data. In our example, we see only SAP solutions which would be an easy scenario. But we all know that in reality your processes look different.

You as a customer also have partner solutions like Industry Cloud as well as Third Party solutions. So our goal is with this integration to come to an integrated end-to-end process. Also consistent master data needs to be available.

For example, if I change something in my SAP Marketing Cloud, the SAP Sales Cloud could be affected as well. In this digital area, paper or e-mail based processes are things of the past. In between the applications, we often see the need to automate the flow of processes as well as media breaks that lead to manual tasks and should be running in an automated fashion.

Therefore, digitized and automated business processes increase productivity and reduce errors. Standard applications can cover most of the required use cases. But each industry, each line of business may have specific needs that can only be covered through personalized extensions. Customers need the possibility to extend and develop to create their own applications and innovations on top of the technology. And that's exactly what our SAP Business Technology Platform is your answer to all of these questions and even more.

So from an SAP applications perspective, how is SAP BTP supporting our application portfolio? A lot of things can of course be made much easier and faster if we all use the same technologies for our solutions. And this is why SAP defined the so called suite qualities, which are delivered by SAP BTP's capabilities. Those suite qualities are reflected by concrete requirements to our application development teams and define how the applications have to handle certain technology-related topics.

So for example, SAP Fiori, this is the guidance for our consistent user interface and allows the combination of all user interfaces to be integrated at a central entry point provided by the technology platform. And, for example to collect all user tasks in a central workflow inbox running on SAP BTP. One suite quality is also to use align domain models. For example, distribution and master data is handled by solutions provided by SAP BTP. To implement end blueprint processes, we need integration and automation technology as well as the content to streamline also, for example, the lifecycle management.

So you see here why we have consistent strategy with SAP BTP as the technology foundation. SAP Business Technology Platform is focusing on five different solution areas - Application development, Automation, Integration, Data and Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence. On those, I would like to give you some more details right now.

So looking at the capabilities for Aapplication development: On the consumption side, SAP BTP provides everything a user needs for a seamless user experience to get the daily work done. So SAP BTP is offering the possibility to act as a central entry point. The SAP Build Work Zone standard edition, formerly known as Launchpad Service, is a personalized application and task launcher whereas the SAP Build Work Zone advanced edition provides a complete integrated digital workplace for the user. For the development of applications, application of process extensions SAP BTP is focusing on the full range of the development community: With the no-code tool SAP Build Apps, formerly known as SAP AppGyver, you can build apps and extensions leveraging visual programming without any coding experience by using modeling based on templates and industry best practices.

Depending on the skills of the developer and the requirements of the scenario, SAP BTP offers the choice to create and operate ABAP based solutions or cloud native applications running either on a Cloud Foundry stack or on Kyma, which is a Kubernetes based runtime environment. So for both parts, ABAP, Cloud Foundry and Kyma, we are offering our application programming model, like the Cloud Application Programming or the ABAP RESTful application programming model. To be even more productive, the full set of available supporting services like technical service supporting, for example, offline handling for mobile application, but also business services serving a specific business related function like, for example, AI-enabled recommendation services can also be leveraged. So the SAP Business Application Studio is our environment to make use of the the building related low-code tools that support all of these.

For the automation topic, the SAP Business Technology Platform offers SAP Build Process Automation - a no-code base tooling to enable all the business process experts besides the classical developments to create automated processes or process extensions as well as automations for manual tasks by leveraging robotic automation technologies. So you see here we have the possibility to bring together workflows, business rules and decisions, robotic process automation - but also the possibility to get insight on your running processes instances and take actions. All the tasks will be again combined within the central Task center, which brings together all the tasks from application portfolio and process automation without that the user having to switch between any system.

The main offering for integration is the SAP Integration Suite, which is the top ranked enterprise integration platform as a service, which even won an award, based on feedback from our customers. The SAP Integration Suite offers nearly all integration styles like A2A, B2B and B2G, API- and event-based integrations. Also we have for example an API management in place to securely expose manage, monitor, and monetize APIs internally or externally, supporting your developer community with easy API discovery, testing, and subscription. The Integration Advisor accelerates the creation of integration scenarios by using AI-based recommendations and automates creation of integration artifacts, which is especially helpful when integrating business partners. On the other side you see we have the SAP Integration Suite Advanced Event Mesh for all our customers who have extended requirements in the eventing area. An additional component there is the Event Mesh, which is a message and event broker, supporting eventing, and messaging technologies for asynchronous and event-based scenarios.

Wherever applicable, technologies and content leverage the SAP One Domain Model and SAP Master Data Integration to align data handling in heterogeneous application landscapes. Additionally, to the technical capabilities that will mainly be used by integration experts, SAP offers a huge set of predefined Integration Suite content, which is consumable from the API Business Hub and can be used to configure, for example, integration or API packages without the need for broad development or integration skillset for the integration between SAP solutions as well as non-SAP solutions for highly integrated end-to-end business process. Data and analytics.

When building cloud extensions, you need to store and process a lot of data. SAP HANA Cloud provides the capabilities to process various data types, federate data storage, and run powerful applications, all on SAP BTP. All the planning and analysis is quite important. Therefore, you could have the BI planning and Augmented analytic capabilities displayed together in the SAP Analytics Cloud. For data management and data warehousing, we have the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

This goes beyond traditional data warehousing to provide a multi-cloud, multi-source business semantic service for enterprise analytics and planning. The SAP Data Intelligent Cloud is a comprehensive data management solution. It transforms distributed data sprawls into vital data insights, supporting innovation and business growth. The last solution area is Artificial Intelligence. Here, the main focus is on the operation of AI scenarios.

SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad, they provide the capabilities for a seamless operation of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning scenarios. In the AI space, our focus is not to offer frameworks for the creation of the models itself, rather than offering you the possibility to take the models that you created with tools of your choice and bring them onto BTP to operate them in an enterprise fashion. So guess what SAP is using to provide and operate all in Machine Learning and AI scenarios embedded into our applications supporting your end-to-end processes? Exactly - we are using the same technologies to handle all the different situations of our customers, handling all the individual adaptations or trainings. Another example that leverage the underlying technologies are our AI business services, which help you to make use of AI-enabled business functions via simple-to-consume services. For example, with Service ticket intelligence, you have a simple service that you can easily train to sort your individual service tickets and assign them to the right components. Despite the capabilities of our main solution areas, SAP BTP is, of course, also covering topics like lifecycle management and security to secure enterprise readiness.

Topics here are, for example, change and deployment management, automation of technical operation tasks, alerting, identity handling also in hybrid landscapes, and, of course, it can be all to easily be integrated into existing application lifecycle management processes. As the name says we are a business technology platform, which means that besides the pure technology we offer pre-defined business content. This includes, for example, consumable predefined bots, workflow packages, rules but also SDKs, and as mentioned before business services. The SAP Integration Suite, for example, offers more than 2,500 pre-packaged integration flows and over 170 open connectors. So you see you're much faster in getting things started with the SAP BTP.

If you are interested and you want to know where to start, then use our free tier model for SAP BTP to explore and try out the services, start developing and learn all the basics. You can access the free tier services via an existing CPEA or PAYG contract or sign up through the SAP Store or your account executive. Each service is limited by some capacity. So use the free tier services as long as the account is active and limits are not reached. Of course, if you're building something nice, you can easily transition into the paid service plans. Free tier services run on the same platform as paid services.

So you as a customer, you get alerted in SAP BTP cockpit when capacity limits are reached. There is no technical migration needed and all work is retained. If you want to start, go into the SAP Discovery Center, our one-stop shop for all resources around SAP BTP. The central BTP entry point SAP Discovery Center offers you SAP BTP information and guidance for example to adapt architecture to realize use cases as guided missions with a step-by-step guide and tutorials.

You can explore best practices enablement and learning content, you can gain more insights into available services by exploring the SAP BTP service catalog, you can already analyze and estimate costs for your next project, you can also gain insights to customer examples, which already adopt the different use cases with the help of BTP services and products. So before I close my session, here are some great learning offerings to complement your conference. You can prepare for a certification in development roles with free SAP Learning Journeys and life-learning sessions led by SAP experts. Save with an exclusive SAP TechEd certification offer that came in your SAP TechEd registration email.

Connect with the experts, expand your network, and share your knowledge and experience with others in the SAP Community and network in a moderate SAP learning group to get your learning questions answered. So you find all the great content at the link which is provided on the slides. So with this, I would like to thank you for listening to my session and I hope you enjoyed it. Enjoy also the rest of the TechEd sessions. Thank you very much and goodbye [MUSIC PLAYING] Oh Delhi.

2022-12-23 19:28

Other news