SAP’s Business Technology Platform for Intelligent Enterprises

The author Devashish Nayak, Delivery manager at Extentia.

According to SAP’s core strategy as an experience-led ‘Intelligent Enterprise’, every company must address three critical challenges in today’s business environment — reducing the cost for bringing innovation, delivering excellent customer experience, and engaging their employees better to retain the top talent. This thought process lies at the base of all SAP’s technology products or solutions. However, several companies face significant challenges in tying the big pieces together, such as technology, innovation, customer experience, profit margins, and data-centric intelligent technologies. They struggle to keep up with the innovation opportunities as managing substantial amounts of data, gaining analytical insights, and taking data-driven insightful actions is not easy.

While monitoring specific operational data that encompasses specific numbers for the business is vital, data that are not particularly tangible such as results of polls, feedback from clients, and more — is equally important. It is extremely important to have seamless access to and effectively analyze the operational as well as the non-operational, experience related data to derive significant insights and palpably improve business processes and outcomes.

To address these challenges, SAP has introduced Business Technology Platform (BTP), providing an integrated suite of SAP technology solutions to help enterprises translate data into meaningful business value. The platform consists of an integrated portfolio of solutions for database and data management, application development and integration, analytics, and intelligent technologies. It offers flexibility for companies to connect and manage data from SAP and other third-party systems through integrated and embedded systems.

Key Areas of Focus for Business Technology Platform:

1. Database and Data Management: Data is often stored at several different locations, which leads to a drop in the quality of available data and raises compliance issues. Enterprises need tools that they can use to manage data to feed into their applications enabled by machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and other similar technologies.

2. Analytics: Enterprises face the challenge of presenting their users with analytics that can be used for effective real-time business decision making. They seek data visualization in the context of their business processes in real-time, and for different business environments and scenarios.

3. Application Development and Integration: Enterprises using third-party ‘platform as a service (Paas)’ vendors, often find it difficult to integrate their ERP data and insights with the platform, leading to the limited application of data intelligence to business processes. They need solutions for application development that can seamlessly integrate data across platforms.

4. Intelligent Technologies: Intelligent technologies are expensive for enterprises. Integrating sophisticated technology tools with business processes needs costly skill sets leading to lower ROI on tech investment for enterprises. They require better insights and business process automation in the cloud, business applications, and devices to justify the costs.

SAP’s Flagship Products in the Business Technology Platform:

The business-centric technologies of SAP Cloud Platform, SAP HANA, SAP Analytics, and SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, which comprise the intelligent suite, propel new data-driven innovation, and help companies transform into intelligent enterprises.

• SAP Cloud Platform gives companies the flexibility to work on their choice of clouds, frameworks, and applications to build custom applications using SAP’s Cloud Platform.
• SAP HANA’s capabilities combine data from operations and experience, enabling improved and impactful decision making.
• SAP Analytics Cloud enables better data-based decision capabilities for teams through business intelligence, augmented analytics, and collaborative planning in a single solution.
• SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation executes processes across multiple systems, cloud solutions, and software as a service (SaaS) offering to support process automation.

Key Strategic Features of Business Technology Platform

• Business-centric platform services: Offering all of SAP’s differentiated services to simplify integration with innovative capabilities of the enterprise and third-party solutions.
• One unified business technology platform for data, analytics, and intelligence: Generating synergies between different technology tools on a single platform to deliver maximum value.
• Partner and developer ecosystem growth: Accelerating the development process of partners’ time-to-market for new features and applications by providing an open platform and simplifying application development on top of SAP products.

As companies expect to get the maximum value from their business applications, SAP aims to provide large-scale innovation in the intelligent suite. The platform embeds intelligent technologies such as AI, machine learning, the IoT, and blockchain in SAP applications to achieve customer-centric business outcomes, deliver consistently, and enhance user experience across the intelligent suite. It provides enterprises the flexibility and speed in the development of business applications while offering user experience to their customers and managing the growing demands of employee experience and high adaptability in applications to perform tasks. While understanding the offerings under BTP is important, choosing the right partner with the required expertise and skill set is equally important.

Advantage Extentia!

Being associated with SAP for more than a decade gives our growing SAP Practice an edge on others and equips us to help companies make the most out of the exhaustive offerings under the BTP umbrella. The right mix of developers, BAs, designers, and a practice head — our team brings to table years of domain experience, having crafted solutions employing the full-range of SAP technology product suite. In one of the most interesting and advanced projects for a customer, we transformed their existing internal timesheet portal, a legacy system used for recording their employees’ working hours — into a new, efficient, and user-friendly tool that could be conveniently used on any device with internet connectivity, on the go. The new, robust mobile responsive web application was built on the SAP Cloud Platform, employing a range of features of UI5, Fiori, and ABAP.

In another state-of-the-art solution for a leading university that organizes multiple events throughout the year, we built an intuitive, easy-to-use, cloud-based event platform following our proven process which is also in line with SAP AppHaus’s human-centered approach and encompasses in-depth user research, onsite team visit, and multiple stakeholder interviews. Replacing the existing manual process with a centralized and seamless workflow process built on the SAP Cloud Platform, we also leveraged Android and iOS SDK for an intuitive mobile app — allowing easy access to data and infrastructure anytime, anywhere. SAP’s SSO feature was employed for seamlessly connecting their internal apps and systems to the SAP Cloud Platform.

As SAP partners, we at Extentia, boast of a comprehensive and enterprise-ready technology portfolio and are equipped to address the challenges enterprises face in today’s business environment. Talk to us!

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Originally published at https://www.extentia.com on October 1, 2020.