Room for Improvement in BTP and Abap

A black box from R/3 to S/4

Anyone who remembers SAP R/3 cannot deny that the system was a black box. Although R/3 could be modified with ABAP, it was largely a closed system—which was fine! Web services and open source were unknown in the B2B world at the time.

Even S/4 started out as a purely on-prem system, although the first cloud-native products were already on the horizon. In 2015, S/4 was introduced by Professor Hasso Plattner, former SAP CEO Bill McDermott, and former Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert. The IT landscape has changed dramatically over the past decade. Linux has become a B2B product following IBM's acquisition of Red Hat. Numerous open source products and initiatives have emerged, such as Cloud Foundry, which SAP is now using extensively.

Today, there are no IT products without Web services and open source components, and the idea of IT platforms has found its way into IT. This combination of the internet, open source, and platforms is shaping digital transformation. SAP's response: BTP (Business Technology Platform) with the Steampunk development framework.

BTP as a swiss army knife

If SAP has its way, the SAP Business Technology Platform will manage all extensions and enhancements in an S/4 system—all with the goal of keeping the ERP core clean! One key component is in line with the Zeitgeist: artificial intelligence. The announcement of the Generative AI Hub at the recent SAP TechEd 2023 is thus a positive development. The Generative AI Hub will be added to the existing SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad at BTP to manage the connection to external LLM models, initially Open AI. SAP is also planning to allow for billing via a separate pricing model (AI units).

BTP should be able to achieve a great deal, but there is still quite a bit of room for improvement. For example, there is still no standardized document management across the entire SAP portfolio. In particular, there is a need to catch up with acquired SAP solutions such as Ariba and SuccessFactors, as well as newly developed products such as BTP and Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

Consistency across all BTP services

According to the DSAG (German-speaking SAP user group), companies are still lacking a cross-service strategy for BTP, as well as consistency across all BTP services and their interactions. A cross-service strategy is necessary in order to better integrate BTP as a platform into enterprise-wide, multi-tier architectures and the associated business services.

For example, monitoring and logging individual services has not yet been standardized. A consistent cloud identity management strategy is also not yet a reality. In addition, a unified access strategy from SAP support to the LoB services would make life easier for customers. A uniform overview of BTP services, including their availability in price lists, is also still missing. DSAG members would like to see the rapid integration of solutions such as Signavio as a fully integrated BTP service, which could facilitate the operational use of BTP.

In summary, a uniform strategy for the interaction of lines of business (LoB) and BTP services must be developed, implemented, and communicated. The user association DSAG sees this as an important approach that needs to be expanded.