Why SAP BTP is different

In a nutshell, SAP BTP is the platform of Intelligent Enterprise that provides technology capabilities that help businesses to achieve agility, integration, extension, and creation of value from data. SAP BTP was first introduced in 2019, built on the legacy of SAP Cloud Platform, but it combined all other technology offerings from SAP to finally become a platform that is unified, business-centric, and open.

Unified

SAP BTP is evolving to be a unified platform with a clear focus on business challenges. It brings together all the technology offerings from SAP on one platform. Based on the goal of unification, SAP decided to sunset the SAP Cloud Platform product name and merged the capabilities into SAP BTP, for example, SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite is renamed SAP Integration Suite.

A unified platform offers a unified experience for customers. SAP is continuing to expand the value of SAP BTP by offering a simplified user experience and out-of-the-box integration and interoperability between SAP applications and technology. The unified platform also provides a consistent commercial model, a simplified platform cockpit, and a catalog of cloud services consumable for different runtimes.

Business-centric

SAP BTP focuses on improving business outcomes and increases business-centricity by being tailored to applications and business processes. It is positioned for use cases along the key integration scenarios mentioned in the previous chapter and enables joint suite-like qualities across the applications, such as a harmonized look and feel, and consistent security and identity management.

The platform includes a semantic layer of business data. The SAP One Domain Model is the common data model that standardizes the key business objects across SAP applications. It is already used in the SAP Master Data Integration service for many master data objects, such as customers, workforce people, suppliers, products, and cost centers. The common data model is also serving as the foundation for APIs and business events, such as SAP Graph, as the simplified and unified API layer for Intelligent Enterprise scenarios. As SAP BTP evolves, the SAP One Domain Model will become more extensible and consumable.

Furthermore, SAP BTP can help companies to gain insights and generate value from data in a business context. It offers semantic data management capabilities through SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, to connect enterprise data and break data silos. It automates the process of data integration and life cycle management and delivers cross-product analytics and dashboards to support data-driven decision-making.

SAP BTP also provides built-in security and compliance to ensure data security and privacy for business-critical information. It offers capabilities to help companies to manage enterprise-wide integrations across heterogeneous environments, including their existing IT and hybrid landscapes. SAP Integration Suite as part of SAP BTP can connect and contextualize processes and data, with more than 2,000 pre-configured integration packs.

Open

SAP BTP is an open platform and builds on collaboration with partners and an open ecosystem.

Firstly, SAP BTP runs on top of multiple cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layers, for both SAP data centers and through partner cloud infrastructures that give customers flexibility and choice. It offers a consumption-based commercial offering with different payment options and a free tier model to enable access to the broader SAP ecosystem at their pace of adoption.

Secondly, SAP BTP will enable direct access to a growing marketplace where partners and ecosystem participants can build, release, and monetize their solutions directly on the platform, and customers can easily consume them within one commercial model.

Lastly, SAP embraces and actively contributes to open source communities. Open projects Gardener and Kyma are such examples. Gardener is an open source project for multi-cloud infrastructure on top of Kubernetes. Kyma is a cloud-native extension platform. We will cover the details of Gardener and Kyma in a later chapter.