BTP discourse

Legacy IT often works with thousands of interfaces. This made it almost impossible to orchestrate security, data management, Gen AI, ERP modifications and programming. The IT industry's answer is platforms that are designed to solve classic middleware tasks in a consolidated, efficient and standardized form. A universal IT tool in the SAP community is the Abap programming language. In the past, it was used to program numerous adaptations in R/3 and ECC 6.0, which often led to an unmanageable level of individualization. SAP's answer: Steampunk, BTP and Clean Core.

Abap for the cloud age

Steampunk is the adaptation of the Abap programming language for the cloud age. With new concepts and commands, it is an important evolution for existing SAP customers. Future ERP modifications and add-ons will find their home base in BTP. This means that Steampunk (Embedded Abap), CAP (Cloud Application Programming) and RAP (RESTful Application Programming) are part of the BTP cloud concept. The necessary ERP modifications and enhancements are given a structure by SAP's Clean Core concept, which defines a framework for making add-ons and modifications releasable.

Steampunk?

The term steampunk stands for transparency, agility and the future. Typical images from this genre show cogwheels, magnifying glasses, steam boilers and mechanical machines as they are - there is no hiding, concealing or concealing here! SAP technology is often hidden behind buzzwords, licenses and clouds. We shed light on the abap, BTP and clean core scene. The clean core strategy aims to preserve the integrity and stability of the S/4 core by reducing customer-specific adaptations and enhancements to a necessary minimum. The clean core approach provides clear rules for future extensions to the S/4 Hana system. This affects Z developments from customers as well as add-ons from SAP partners. Björn Dunkel from SAP partner ifm in Heidelberg, among others, will report on this at the SAP Community Summit.

New ERP architectures are based on a platform concept that transforms best-of-breed into a composite ERP architecture (Composable ERP). In future, the leading system could no longer be an application such as R/3, ERP/ECC 6.0 or S/4, but an agile and networked platform.

There is still no clear market leader in the IT platform market: users deal with offers pragmatically and also use several platforms. In the December 2024 issue, E3 magazine reported on page 16 about an existing SAP customer from the Arab region that uses a Boomi platform for its core ERP task SAP BTP and for its entire IT. At the upcoming Steampunk and BTP Summit Boomi will present the orchestration of BTP and Boomi.

The paradigm shift to an IT platform economy with a composable ERP has not yet taken place. In his BTP presentation in Heidelberg, Christian Knell from SAP partner Snap Consulting will explain the possibilities of future modifications in an S/4 composable ERP. BTP offers the possibility of individualizing SAP systems. The ERP core remains standardized and clean. But BTP is a complex platform that requires a deep understanding of its functionalities. There are still many questions about the billing system, the technical basis and the programming languages to be used.