Ideally, innovation and confidence go hand in hand. Businesses take risks with their reputations to achieve big – and sometimes seemingly impossible – goals. Confidence spurs them forward, especially when they have the right digital foundation.
Modern business resilience and growth depend heavily on technology, so it stands to reason that having the right technology foundation is critical. According to Forrester, firms that have a flexible technology foundation and a business operating model that can change quickly grow nearly three times faster than their industry average.
For SAP partners and their customers, the journey toward achieving that level of confidence begins with choosing SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). The business-centric platform provides building blocks – including prebuilt content, integration accelerators, business semantics, data models, industry and line-of-business best practices, and intelligent technologies and services – that can accelerate innovation outcomes that help positively impact business performance. And those that innovate faster score higher on customer satisfaction, brand perception, and talent management, according to SAP research.
Expanding the Capacity for Ingenuity
Digital technology has steadily moved from on-premise landscapes to a dynamic cloud environment – changing the fundamental nature of innovation. Initially, pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies launched. Then came platform-as-a-service (PaaS), a growing market that includes hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba.
This growing mix of SaaS and PaaS has created a hybrid scenario of stand-alone microservices, point solutions, and processes that lack centralized control. IDC estimates that enterprises use more than 175 unique SaaS applications and deploy 15% more year over year. As a result, 83% of global IT professionals will prioritize enterprise integration over the next one to two years, based on research conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of TechTarget.
SAP partners can demystify this decentralization of the cloud with SAP BTP. This approach provides application development, process automation, integration, data and analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities on a single, integrated platform. Organizations can then optimize their innovations’ business value, compliance, and customer satisfaction with trusted data, best-practice processes, and reliable infrastructure.
Pushing New Ideas on a Synchronized Platform
At the core of the integration philosophy of SAP BTP are seven suite qualities that contribute to a more simplified and synchronized innovation process:
- An integrated user experience that includes a harmonized look, feel, and navigation pattern
- A single workflow inbox to centralize task management
- End-to-end business blueprints supporting reference architectures suitable for implementation
- Aligned domain models with business objects across applications
- Consistent security and identity management for centralized provisioning and authentication
- Coordinated lifecycle management for harmonizing provisioning setup and operations
- Embedded intelligence and analytics that provide a holistic view of the business and customers
These suite qualities serve as a technical building plan for all integration needs, including processes, data, user experiences (UX), and analyses. SAP partners can then apply their unique expertise and services to help our joint customers accelerate innovation and become more agile – uniting their systems, processes, and data. Users can create personalized UXs that instantly work with SAP applications, build solutions faster with business context, and deploy them in a cloud environment that’s trusted, secure, and connected.
By using SAP BTP as the backbone for simplified and scalable integration, our customers are benefiting from a holistic approach that yields measurable outcomes. Take, for example, Steinbeis Papier GmbH. The sustainable closed-loop manufacturer engaged SAP partner avato consulting AG to pull information from disparate data sources and harmonize it into a single integrated and unified vision – minimizing manual processes while providing real-time KPIs.
More importantly, SAP partners can help their customers open the door to more diverse, multifaceted business innovations to improve competitiveness. For example, revenue sources can be adapted or invented by transforming existing business models and sales channels with solutions and services in SAP BTP.
Delivering Innovation with Simplicity and Trust
Innovation is a critical part of growing a business. But resulting outcomes mean little to a company if they are misaligned with established needs, impractical for existing processes, or not a tangible improvement compared to previous experiences.
With SAP BTP and its integration tools and services, users can leverage decades of experience in mission-critical innovations in application development, industry problem-solving, and line-of-business excellence to deliver connected solutions efficiently. For example, the platform provides more than 2,000 predefined integrations between SAP solutions and third-party software that are readily configured and deployed, fully managed, and supported by SAP.
That kind of support gives SAP partners and our customers the confidence they need to combine their knowledge of unique business requirements with an open platform of trusted data, synchronized processes, and integrated technologies and services. And together, they’re overcoming their latest challenges with highly impactful innovations.
To learn more about how SAP partners help businesses transition to the cloud with a unified technology platform, explore these articles. If you’re interested in software partnership opportunities with SAP, check out SAP PartnerEdge, Build. And if you’re already a partner, check out these exciting initiatives: Hack2Build and SAP Co-Innovation Lab.
Tom Le is global vice president of Partner Solution Advisory at SAP.
