SAP Business Technology Platform: With Use Cases Back to its Roots and into the Cloud

Fifty years ago, the first steps of a little startup called SAP happened, for the most part, at its customers’ premises and mainframes. There, the five founders and their team could work and develop at night to use their computers outside office hours. The card punchers used in 1972 at ICI Germany are a thing of the past. But SAP’s close and trustful collaboration with customers is still more than alive today.

With the creation of specific, repeatable use cases on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), the company helps its ecosystem prepare for the next leap towards digital transformation and the move of businesses and organizations into the cloud.

Innovation Work with Customers Today

SAP BTP brings together data and analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), application development, automation, and integration in one unified environment. The platform focuses on enabling business scenarios and can offer semantic integration of business data, easy access to contextual data, and a harmonized experience across all cloud solutions from SAP.

Faithful to its roots and origins, SAP invites customers and partners to accelerate their digital transformation by publishing various SAP BTP use cases, of which 10 will be featured at SAP TechEd this year. These repeatable, actionable use cases built on SAP BTP are displayed to customers and users to aid in benefiting and learning from existing solution patterns developed for a certain business case. They describe how to achieve a specific business outcome and include detailed SAP BTP implementation guidance called “missions” in SAP Discovery Center. They are publicly available and can serve as a sort of starter package into the cloud.

The guiding principle behind these use cases is what helped one customer solve a business problem can inspire and serve others to solve the same or a similar problem. Following SAP’s ambition to help the world run better, it is more important than ever to use the knowledge of the community, benefit from the solutions that helped others, exchange openly, and learn from each other in the best possible way.

“Our 10 new SAP BTP use cases to be released at SAP TechEd 2022 address some of the most common problems our customers face on their digital transformation journey. Those issues range from business process extensibility and multi-region high availability to blending SAP business data with hyperscaler data lakes without the need for replication. The use cases include well-documented implementation steps in SAP Discovery Center and boilerplate code templates in GitHub. I invite you to try them out and let us know your feedback. My teams and I are looking forward to working with you to build more use cases in the coming months.”

Juergen Mueller, chief technology officer and member of the Executive Board, SAP

Repeatable, Actionable Use Cases in the Cloud

SAP BTP use cases describe how customers can address a business challenge by leveraging the platform in a set of steps and how to achieve certain business values or other technical outcomes such as security, high-availability, and resilient application development. In short, it describes how to ‘use’ the technology and work process to prove a ‘case’ of business value.

They are built to enable SAP customers, from business users to developers alike, with business outcome-driven examples to help accelerate the understanding and adoption of SAP BTP. Use cases are customer-proven examples and best practices that contain pre-built business content, such as open connectors, application programming interfaces (APIs), and automation packages made available in SAP Discovery Center. They can assist and inspire each customer’s implementation journey on SAP BTP and support developers in solving problems through the application of well-defined implementation missions. And, finally, they enable customers to get started with SAP BTP and come to results faster. The use of such prepackaged cases helps improve the time to value for SAP customers, be it along lines of business, industries, SAP BTP, RISE with SAP, or any other given business context.

From Monolithic Places to Diversified Software Landscapes Built on SAP BTP

No doubt, times have also changed in other aspects of business software realities. In the early days, business applications resided in one monolithic place, like in central on-premise computers and mainframes. Today, more and more businesses use applications that reside in a diversified cloud landscape. With SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP offers a solid and flexible foundation for such diversified software architectures, enabling them to be open for extensions and integration of all kinds of applications and solutions.

With ready-to-use, actionable use cases, SAP helps customers understand how to make best use of the opportunities the platform offers. SAP BTP lays the foundation for organizations to move forward and become intelligent enterprises. While the complexity of software landscapes increased, SAP offers the SAP BTP use cases to help simplify and accelerate the way towards the cloud.

“Our team was able to deliver key performance indicators and process visibility for our procurement organization very fast by using the mission ‘Respond to business needs quickly with agile procurement operations.’ The project board helped us implement and go live step-by-step. Also, the SAP mission owners helped us when needed.”

Dominik Meier, senior director, Platform Engineering, ADIDAS

“Going through the mission ‘Process and approve your invoices with SAP Process Automation‘ is a great way to get in touch with new SAP BTP no-code technologies, helping you grasp how the development and deployment process is carried out. Creating forms with input/output fields and connecting them in a graphical layout is straightforward and it is great to achieve a fast prototype or proof of concept of a future full application. By completing the mission, you get an idea of what is possible with the platform.”

Pablo Gonzales, senior software engineer, Mercado Libre

Imke Vierjahn is SAP AppHaus communications lead.