Architecting Solutions with SAP Business Technology Platform E-Book

Serdar Simsekler

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 667

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

SAP BTP is the foundation of SAP’s intelligent and sustainable enterprise vision for its customers. It’s efficient, agile, and an enabler of innovation. It’s technically robust, yet its superpower is its business centricity.
If you’re involved in building IT and business strategies, it’s essential to familiarize yourself with SAP BTP to see the big picture for digitalization with SAP solutions. Similarly, if you have design responsibilities for enterprise solutions, learning SAP BTP is crucial to produce effective and complete architecture designs.
This book teaches you about SAP BTP in five parts. First, you’ll see how SAP BTP is positioned in the intelligent enterprise. In the second part, you’ll learn the foundational elements of SAP BTP and find out how it operates. The next part covers integration architecture guidelines, integration strategy considerations, and integration styles with SAP’s integration technologies. Later, you’ll learn how to use application development capabilities to extend enterprise solutions for innovation and agility. This part also includes digital experience and process automation capabilities. The last part covers how SAP BTP can facilitate data-to-value use cases to produce actionable business insights.
By the end of this SAP book, you’ll be able to architect solutions using SAP BTP to deliver high business value.

Leseprobe

Architecting Solutions with SAP Business Technology Platform

An architectural guide to integrating, extending, and innovating enterprise solutions using SAP BTP

Serdar Simsekler

Eric Du

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Architecting Solutions with SAP Business Technology Platform

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To my wife Busra, (the Muse), and my children, Daniel Kerim (the Pioneer) and Isaac Faruk (the Integrator), for being my source of happiness. And, to my parents Mucefer and Ibrahim for their unconditional support throughout all my life.

– Serdar Simsekler

I am grateful to a large number of people who have taken the time to discuss various topics and share their knowledge with me. Thanks to the editors and team for their patience with my slow writing and unusual requests. Finally, my love goes to my family for their support through the writing process.

– Eric Du

Contributors

About the authors

Serdar Simsekler is passionate about delivering innovative and robust technology solutions for business needs. His focus areas are enterprise architecture, IT strategy, innovation, cloud architecture, integration patterns, and software architecture. Currently working as an SAP Architect at Deloitte, he supports the digital transformation of several clients. He also leads Deloitte UK’s SAP Cloud Architecture and BTP capability. In his previous Head of SAP Technology role at Centrica, he was responsible for developing the technology strategy for the entire SAP landscape of the enterprise. He likes reading philosophy and keeps self-nurturing his curiosity to learn new things. He lives with his wife and two sons in Surrey, United Kingdom.

Eric Du is a product and technology leader with a broad experience and expertise in the enterprise space. Currently working as VP of Technology & Architecture at SAP SuccessFactors, he leads the architectural efforts for the technology transformation by defining the target architecture, platform strategy, and culture transformation. Prior to this role, he focused on SAP’s cross-product strategy and co-led SAP’s overall North Star Architecture to shape the technology vision for SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise strategy and define the architecture guardrails. Based in Silicon Valley, Eric is passionate about innovations; he serves the role of advisor and investor for multiple start-up companies. He lives with his family in Dublin, California.

About the reviewer

As a lead solution architect at one of the world’s leading technology companies, Haishan Qian designs, builds, and implements large-scale enterprise finance systems for global business operations, including digital media stores, subscription services, retail, and finished goods.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1 Introduction – What is SAP Business Technology Platform?

1

The Intelligent Enterprise

What is Intelligent Enterprise?

SAP offerings for Intelligent Enterprise

Intelligent Suite and Industry Cloud

BTP

Business Network

Sustainability management

Experience Management

Business Process Intelligence 

Multi-cloud infrastructure

Integration

RISE with SAP

Summary

2

SAP Business Technology Platform Overview

Why SAP BTP is different

Unified

Business-centric

Open

SAP BTP technology capabilities

Database and data management

Analytics

Application development and integration

Intelligent technologies

Summary

Part 2 Foundations

3

Establishing a Foundation for SAP Business Technology Platform

Technical requirements

Environments and regions

Services

Which environment?

Regions

Which region?

Commercial models

Which commercial model?

Trial accounts and the free tier

Monitoring your consumption

Account model

Global accounts

Directories

Subaccounts

Elements specific to environments

Entitlements

Setting up your account model

Services

Applications and subscriptions

Runtime environments

Services and service instances

Connecting with external environments

Taxonomy

SAP Discovery Center

Estimator Tool

Account administration

SAP BTP Cockpit

SAP BTP CLI

SAP BTP administration APIs

Summary

4

Security and Connectivity

Technical requirements

Security in general

Infrastructure security and the provider’s security compliance

Security at the application layer

Data protection and privacy

IAM in SAP BTP

Authentication and authorization

What does an IdP do?

How does SAP BTP authenticate users?

RBAC in SAP BTP

Identity lifecycle management

Governing identity access

Audit logging

IAM in hybrid environments

Connectivity

Connecting SAP BTP and on-premise systems

Destination service

Principal (user) propagation

The big connectivity picture

Private Link service

Summary

5

Non-Functional Design for Operability

Technical requirements

Non-functional design elements

Security

Business continuity

Data management

Performance, capacity, and scalability

Observability

Understanding SLAs

SAP BTP SLAs

Working with SLAs

Getting support

Support services

People

Resources

Summary

Part 3 Integration

6

Defining Integration Strategy

Technical requirements

Integration methodology

SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology

Integration actors

Integration domains

Integration styles

Approach

SAP’s integration technologies

SAP Integration Suite (service)

Other cloud-based integration services

On-premise components

SAP API Business Hub

Architectural considerations

Technology

Security

Observability

Licensing

Landscape

Strategic alignment

Summary

7

Cloud Integration

Technical requirements

Designing application integration scenarios

Anatomy of an integration flow

Message processing

Step types

Persistence

Message security

Performance and capacity

Delivery procedure

API-based integration

SAP APIM elements

The APIM lifecycle

API policy types

Simplified connectivity with third-party applications

The elements of SAP Open Connectors

Benefits

Event-driven integration

Why do we need event-driven integration?

SAP Event Mesh

Master data integration

SAP ODM

SAP MDI

SAP Graph

Design examples

A common cloud integration platform

A version of the digital integration hub

A B2G integration scenario for submitting tax returns

Using events to enhance business partner data

Summary

8

Data Integration

Technical requirements

Why do we need data integration?

How is data integration different from process integration?

Data integration techniques

SAP Data Intelligence

Foundations

Data governance

Data integration and orchestration

ML

Other SAP solutions for data integration

Summary

Part 4 Extensibility

9

Application Development

Technical requirements

Implementing extensions

Extensibility options

Development platform types

Low-code/no-code development

Pro-code development

Comparison

SAP AppGyver

SAP BTP runtime environments

Cloud Foundry runtime environment

Kyma runtime environment

ABAP runtime environment

Choosing the right runtime environment

Frontend applications

The OData protocol

SAPUI5/OpenUI5

Example architecture design

SAP Fiori

Backend applications

Cloud Application Programming (CAP) model

Example architecture design

ABAP RESTful Application Programming (RAP) model

HANA applications

Example architecture design

SAP Cloud SDK

Mobile applications

SAP Mobile Development Kit

SAP Mobile Cards

Mobile backend tools

Mobile Transaction Bridge

SAP BTP SDK for iOS and SAP BTP SDK for Android

Example architecture design

Application development tools

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

Other application development tools

Launchpad applications

The SAP Launchpad service

SAP Work Zone

SAP Mobile Start

Example architecture design

Non-functional design

Example architecture design

Other related services

Example architecture design

Deployment considerations

Continuous integration and the build pipeline

Continuous delivery and the release pipeline

Example scenario

Summary

10

Digital Process Automation

Technical requirements

Process automation in the intelligent enterprise

SAP Process Automation

Business processes

Monitoring

Store

Summary

11

Containers and Kubernetes

Understanding Kubernetes architecture

The control plane

Nodes

Blurring the layers of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

Understanding Kubernetes objects

Imperative and declarative

Extensions and custom resources

Understanding Gardener

Gardener architecture

Understanding Kyma

SAP BTP, Kyma Runtime

When should you use Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes?

Summary

Part 5 Data to Value

12

SAP HANA Cloud

Technical requirements

Data-driven use cases

Data architecture concepts and patterns

OLTP, OLAP, HTAP

NoSQL, big data, and cloud object stores

Data federation and data replication

SAP HANA Cloud

Tools to access SAP HANA Cloud

SAP HANA Cloud, HANA Database

System architecture and server types

Development with SAP HANA

Data integration through federation and replication

Data encryption

HA and BC

Compatibility and migration

Pricing

Release strategy and data center availability

SAP HANA Cloud, Data Lake

Summary

13

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud

Technical requirements

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC)

Use cases

Understanding Space

Connectivity and data integration

Data modeling

Data consumption

Audit logging

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC)

Connectivity

Data preparation

Creating stories with Story Designer

Creating analytics applications with Analytics Designer

Content Network

Embedded analytics

SAC APIs

Smart features

Planning

System landscapes and content life cycle management

Security concepts – users, roles, teams, and licenses

Administration Cockpit

Summary

14

SAP Intelligent Technologies

Overview of Intelligent Technologies

HANA ML

APL and PAL

Python and R ML clients for SAP HANA

ML/AI in SAP Data Intelligence

SAC smart features

SAP AI Core, SAP AI Launchpad, and SAP AI API

SAP AI Core

SAP AI Launchpad

SAP AI API

SAP AI Business Services

SAP Conversational AI

SAP Process Automation

Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management for S/4HANA

Data architecture for AI

Data Privacy and Protection

Summary

Index

Other Books You May Enjoy

Preface

Digitalization has been a priority for all sizable companies to introduce efficiency, agility, and innovation. The world is changing so fast, and customers are becoming more demanding. Every company has its own digital transformation strategy to differentiate itself from the competition, and executives know that digitalization is vital for differentiation.

SAP BTP is the foundation of SAP’s intelligent and sustainable enterprise vision for its customers. It’s efficient, agile, and an enabler for innovation. It’s technically robust, yet its superpower is its business centricity.

If you are involved in building IT and business strategies, it’s essential to get yourself familiar with SAP BTP to see the big picture for digitalization with SAP solutions. Similarly, if you have design responsibilities for enterprise solutions, learning SAP BTP is crucial to produce effective and complete architecture designs.

Before reading a technical book, it’s important to align your objectives with what the book offers. Architecting Solutions with SAP Business Technology Platform aims to provide a generalist view of SAP BTP capabilities. We were careful to provide design examples so that you can see in action the SAP BTP features we discussed.

There may be parts where we delve into more detail than usual or topics that we cover with briefer content than others. At the end of the day, we wanted to cover the end-to-end spectrum of SAP BTP services and provide as many primers as we could. This way, we hope you can see the complete picture of what SAP BTP caters to and get the right direction for further studying.

With this book, you’ll learn SAP BTP in five parts. First, you’ll see how SAP BTP is positioned in the intelligent enterprise. In the second part, you will learn the foundational elements of SAP BTP and how it operates. The next part covers integration architecture guidelines, integration strategy considerations, and integration styles with SAP’s integration technologies. Later, you’ll learn how to use application development capabilities to extend enterprise solutions for innovation and agility. This part also includes digital experience and process automation capabilities. The last part covers how SAP BTP can facilitate data-to-value and business intelligence use cases to produce actionable insights.

By the end of this book, you’ll be able to architect solutions using SAP BTP to deliver high business value. Now, there is a lot to learn and time is precious. Happy reading!

Disclaimer:

Some diagrams in this book contain materials from SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagrams, Design Elements & Icons, used with the permission of SAP SE.

Who this book is for

This SAP guide is for technical architects, solution architects, and enterprise architects working with SAP solutions to drive digital transformation and innovation with SAP BTP. We assume our readers already have some IT background and an understanding of basic cloud concepts. Working knowledge of the SAP ecosystem will also be beneficial.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, The Intelligent Enterprise, introduces you to SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise, its value propositions, and the business processes it can enable.

Chapter 2, SAP Business Technology Platform Overview, introduces the key pillars of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

Chapter 3, Establishing a Foundation for SAP Business Technology Platform, contains information on the foundational concepts of SAP BTP so that you understand the terminology and fundamental information before delving into the details in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4, Security and Connectivity, contains information about the security elements of SAP BTP, which will help you understand the platform foundation that provides services for IAM and other security requirements.

Chapter 5, Non-Functional Design for Operability, provides information on how to design for operability considering non-functional requirements. This chapter will cover the NFD elements collectively and refer to further details that will be discussed in later chapters. This chapter will also discuss how SAP BTP is supported by SAP, SLA arrangements, Trust Center, engagements, and more.

Chapter 6, Defining Integration Strategy, teaches you about structured elements for building an integration methodology and defining an integration strategy.

Chapter 7, Cloud Integration, helps you understand process integration better by explaining the available options in SAP Integration Suite and elaborating on various use cases. As cross use cases, the API-based and event-driven integration topics will be explained by focusing on APIM and Event Mesh. Finally, the Open Connectors capability will be explained to illustrate how streamlined third-party application connectivity works.

Chapter 8, Data Integration, helps you understand data integration better by elaborating on various data integration use cases, mainly introducing the capabilities of SAP Data Intelligence and briefly touching upon other data integration solutions.

Chapter 9, Application Development, provides information on the application development options that you can incorporate in architecture designs. This chapter will introduce the Extension Suite capabilities and other SAP BTP services for digital experience.

Chapter 10, Digital Process Automation, explains what SAP BTP offers for process automation.

Chapter 11, Containers and Kubernetes, introduces the cloud-native programming model in SAP BTP. This chapter also explores how to use open-source projects and the capabilities of SAP using Gardener and Kyma.

Chapter 12, SAP HANA Cloud, introduces SAP HANA Cloud for storing and processing data.

Chapter 13, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud, introduces SAP Data Warehouse Cloud for modeling business semantics and SAP Analytics Cloud for advanced analytics, looking at how to use them to gain insights and support business decisions with confidence.

Chapter 14, SAP Intelligent Technologies, introduces SAP’s ML/AI offerings to embed intelligence into your business processes.

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Preface

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Part 1 Introduction – What is SAP Business Technology Platform?

This part will introduce you to SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) with an aim to highlight its importance and benefits. The first chapter will also help establish the role of SAP BTP as the platform of Intelligent Enterprise.

This part contains the following chapters:

Chapter 1, The Intelligent EnterpriseChapter 2, SAP Business Technology Platform Overview

1

The Intelligent Enterprise

In today’s fast-moving world, businesses are constantly dealing with changes. What becomes clear is businesses with a digital strategy have been at an advantage to adapt to and navigate the crisis better. The COVID-19 crisis has made this imperative more urgent than ever. It has pushed companies over the technology tipping point and speeded up the adoption of digital technologies by several years.

Shifts during the crisis are most likely to stick through the recovery or have been transformed forever. To stay ahead, businesses need to adjust to evolving customer needs or expectations, increase remote working and online collaborations, build redundancy and full visibility in the supply chain with the qualification of additional suppliers, and use advanced technologies in operations and business decision-making. SAP’s products and services address this need for agility by delivering software services to enable businesses to integrate and extend end-to-end (E2E) business processes, create new business models, and ultimately run as intelligent enterprises.

Even though this book is mainly about SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), it is important to understand the overall framework and how SAP BTP is fitting into the picture as the platform of Intelligent Enterprise. In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

What is Intelligent Enterprise?SAP offerings for Intelligent Enterprise

What is Intelligent Enterprise?

To overcome challenges and stay ahead in their industry, businesses must be agile and resilient. Businesses should consistently apply advanced technologies and best practices to transform, innovate, and grow more profitable and sustainable. Intelligent Enterprise is the strategy and framework that represents what a modern enterprise looks like. SAP’s strategy is enabled by an entire portfolio of products and services to help businesses to become intelligent enterprises—best-run businesses are intelligent enterprises.

So, what does an intelligent enterprise look like? An intelligent enterprise will run the most critical business processes with industry-leading applications that work together smoothly and with best practices. These processes span different areas of business operations from lead generation to payment, recruiting to retirement, sourcing to managing different categories of spend, and product design to operate. Data is connected through all these processes to increase efficiency, gain better insights, and make decisions confidently.

The following screenshot provides an overview of the Intelligent Enterprise framework and its components. Through this chapter, we will introduce them and how they fit into the overall framework:

Figure 1.1: Intelligent Enterprise overview

SAP offerings for Intelligent Enterprise

The SAP Intelligent Enterprise framework provides essential components and helps businesses to adopt capabilities and deliver business outcomes. In this section, we will first discuss the major components of Intelligent Enterprise. After that, we will discuss how they are integrated through business processes and suite qualities.

Intelligent Suite and Industry Cloud

SAP offers the Intelligent Suite, an integrated suite of applications to support E2E business processes. This suite helps businesses to manage every part of their organization and processes, including customers, employees, supply chains, products, finance, and spend. This comprehensive solution suite brings together SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, customer experience, and intelligent spend solutions with out-of-the-box integrations, alongside critical business processes that every business will need, such as Lead to Cash, Design to Operate, Source to Pay, and Recruit to Retire. The Intelligent Suite is both well integrated and can be consumed in a modular way. It is also infrastructure-agnostic, which results in simplifying adoption and customer choices of running in SAP’s cloud infrastructure or through partner cloud providers.

Intelligent Suite offers a great foundation with integrated E2E processes for all industries. Industry Cloud is an extension of Intelligent Suite with innovative industry cloud solutions built by SAP and its partners in SAP BTP. SAP’s Industry Cloud is an open business process and technology platform to foster co-innovation between customers, partners, and SAP, to jointly create new business practices resulting in a set of solutions relevant to respective industries. Partners who are looking to extend Intelligent Enterprise can find open application programming interfaces (APIs), data models, commercialization models, and—of course—SAP BTP to innovate for different industries.

BTP

SAP BTP is the technological foundation for the intelligent enterprise. It is a unified, business-centric, and open platform for SAP applications and the entire SAP ecosystem. In a nutshell, SAP BTP provides capabilities in the areas of application development, database and data management, analytics, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), integration, and extension. It is the platform that integrates SAP’s Intelligent Suite and the foundation of Industry Cloud. It provides businesses with what they need to transform their business, and the flexibility to run their business applications in multi-cloud environments. SAP BTP can be leveraged to integrate with your existing information technology (IT) landscape, extend SAP solutions including integration with third-party solutions, and enhance the ability to turn data into value.

Business Network

Business Network helps organizations and their trading partners to become more agile and resilient and drive better business outcomes.

At its global Sapphire Now conference in June 2021, SAP announced a bold vision to create new business communities through SAP Business Network, which brings together SAP Ariba Network, SAP Logistics Business Network, and SAP Asset Intelligence Network. It brings together over 5 million organizations that will benefit from this connected community through the unified offering of SAP Business Network. The first major offering is a unified trading partner portal that provides new collaboration scenarios and enables greater responsiveness. It centralizes access to explore and collaborate with customers, supports intelligent trading partner onboarding and registration, and provides a highly configurable workbench enabling personalized experience based on roles.

In addition, buyers and trading partners can collaborate using shared data and workflows, applying network-wide intelligence to achieve informed business decisions.

Sustainability management

Sustainability is one of the biggest challenges of our lifetime. Businesses must show accountability and operate in an intelligent way and embed sustainability management as part of core business processes. Sustainability must include raw material sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, or even recycling processes, so E2E supply chain transparency is critical.

SAP solutions have embedded analytical and transactional capabilities that integrate sustainability performance and insights into business processes, which provide a solid foundation to optimize business results and sustainability impacts together. This means businesses can manage product footprints holistically and understand carbon emission insights through the entire value chain. They can manage extended producer responsibility by keeping track of public commitments and new regulations, streamlining compliance processes, and leveraging business network intelligence to gain full supply chain visibility (SCV).

Experience Management

SAP introduced Experience Management (XM) with the capabilities of Qualtrics. To understand what XM is, let’s start with what O-data and X-data are.

O-data is operational data; it’s the insights from day-to-data operations, for all the business processes, in sales, service, human resources (HR), finance, and procurement. O-data tells what is happening. X-data is experience data and is fundamentally different from O-data. It is the human factor—beliefs, emotions, intentions, and sentiments. X-data tells you why things are happening, as well as what matters most to your customers, employees, products, and brands.

SAP has the most comprehensive portfolio to help companies run their businesses, across all lines of business. This is where O-data comes from. Qualtrics is the XM platform to collect X-data from all kinds of channels. X-data adds insights into human factors, helping operational systems take action on every moment that matters, to optimize processes that lead to outcomes of better customer satisfaction and employee engagement, better product-market fit, and brand success.

When X-data connects with O-data, businesses can start to understand why things are happening and put in place necessary actions for improvements. This is the continuous feedback and improvement loop that we can summarize as a simple methodology of listen, understand, and act. This is what all businesses will need to win and grow in this experience economy.

Business Process Intelligence 

Business Process Intelligence (BPI) is the process layer within the SAP portfolio, combining process insights and improvement solutions from SAP and process mining and transformation technology through the acquisition of Signavio. It includes components such as process discovery, mining, design and simulate, improvement, rollout, and governance of workflows. BPI solutions help businesses to understand and transform their processes and lay the foundation to become the intelligent enterprise of the future.

Multi-cloud infrastructure

SAP embraces a multi-cloud strategy and provides certain flexibilities for customers to run their applications on the infrastructure of their choice, either in SAP data centers or through a partnership with leading cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Alibaba Cloud in China. It helps customers to be more agile and works better with their own cloud strategies, providing necessary optimizations to increase cloud resiliency, business continuity (BC), security operations, and opportunities to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Integration

A key part of SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise strategy is integration, to provide out-of-the-box integration for E2E business processes in the cloud and in hybrid scenarios and provide a consistent user experience (UX) with a core set of suite-like qualities. The integration approach goes far beyond technical integration; instead, it offers a holistic integration of business processes, technology, and data. Together, it helps to lower efforts for customized integrations, shorten time to value (TTV), and reduce the complexity of operations. The integration also enables intelligence with connected data and insights.

Integrated business processes

SAP is continuing to invest in integrated business processes across the portfolio, and has made significant progress with a cloud-first approach but also by enabling hybrid scenarios with SAP S/4HANA on-premises. Key processes include the following:

Lead to CashRecruit to RetireSource to PayDesign to Operate

Lead to Cash

Today, it is important for organizations to engage with their customers most effectively. The Lead to Cash process brings together SAP Customer Experience (SAP CX) solutions (including SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud, SAP Configure Price Quote (SAP CPQ), and more) and SAP S/4HANA to help organizations understand their customers’ needs and meet their expectations.

The customer experience really starts from the initial interaction with prospects, all the way to order fulfillment, service delivery, or even the return process. A good experience requires seamless collaboration between marketing and sales teams, supported by capabilities through integration that allows customers to build qualified pipelines faster, automated opportunity updates to the quote creation process, and flexible pricing configurations.

The Lead to Cash process also enables new business models with the flexibility to sell physical products, service products, and subscription products in a unified way based on their own specific combinations.

Recruit to Retire

The global pandemic has dramatically changed the way everyone works and how every organization engages its workforce, including both employees and external workers. This is where Recruit to Retire comes to play. The process brings together solutions of SAP SuccessFactors, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Concur, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Analytics Cloud, and Qualtrics. It provides an E2E HR process that enables businesses to understand and optimize all aspects through the entire lifecycle, from recruiting, onboarding, learning, performance, and even offboarding. It helps to manage the workforce in line with business objectives and take care of the employee experience.

Recruit to Retire is supported by three sub-processes, as outlined here:

Hire to Retire covers employee experience through the employment lifecycle—for example, new hiring information shared across different modules of SAP SuccessFactors from recruiting to onboarding. Travel to Reimburse covers travel and expense management—for example, delta posting allows paid expense reports from SAP Concur to be adjusted for audit compliance and decreasing cost.External Workforce provides capabilities to engage with the contingent workforce—for example, settlement receipt prevents invoice variance and faster closure of transactions in SAP Fieldglass.

Source to Pay

With economic volatility at an all-time high, customers have increased the need for procurement agility and integrated platforms more than ever before, including key priorities such as strengthening supply-chain resilience, transparency, and 360-degree visibility, centralized sourcing, persona-based guided buying, and contract management.

The Source to Pay process brings together best-of-breed SAP procurement applications (including SAP S/4HANA, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, and SAP Fieldglass), along with SAP Business Network, on a common platform with integrated data models and UXs. The out-of-the-box real-time analytical insights and intelligence help to enhance decision-making. The process covers strategic, tactical, and operational procurement, as well as supplier management and collaboration, as outlined here:

Supplier Management and Collaboration integrates supplier records with consistent qualification, segmentation, and supplier risk management.Source and Contract manages sourcing, contracting, and spend analysis processes for all types of spend—for example, direct and indirect materials and services.Procure to Pay provides an intuitive persona-based guided buying experience and invoice management capabilities on a single platform.

Design to Operate

The Design to Operate process can help customers run resilient and sustainable supply chains. It provides capabilities to incorporate an E2E lifecycle of a product or asset from the design phase to its operation. The scenarios bring together SAP S/4HANA, SAPProduct Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM), SAP Integrated Business Planning, SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud, SAP Logistics Business Network (SAP LBN), SAP Asset Intelligence Network, SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM), and other solutions to address several sub-processes such as Idea to Market, Plan to Fulfill, and Acquire to Decommission, supporting both cloud-to-cloud and hybrid integrations. These sub-processes are outlined in more detail here:

Idea to Market covers the inception of a product idea from its definition into product design and engineering requirements.Plan to Fulfill covers the journey of product-related information through the stages of supply and demand planning, manufacturing, and logistics.Acquire to Decommission captures the entire lifetime of an industrial asset from when it is received, onboarded, operated, and maintained, until decommissioning.

Suite qualities

Essential suite qualities are required to provide a truly integrated Intelligent Suite, across the E2E processes, with a consistent and harmonized UX. For that, SAP defined a set of common qualities, as outlined here:

Seamless User Experience supports a harmonized look and feel and navigation patterns based on Fiori experience and design principles.Consistent Security and Identity Management simplifies identity provisioning authentication and access management.Aligned Domain Models aligns business objects across applications, simplifies master data integration and reusability, and enables aligned APIs and business events. Embedded and Cross-Product Analytics integrates data across multiple products to provide a holistic view and gain new insights.Coordinated Lifecycle Management harmonizes tenant provisioning, configuration, and operations.End-to-End Process Blueprints provides reference architectures that can be implemented and extended based on customer requirements. One Workflow Inbox centralizes and simplifies workflow task management.

RISE with SAP

We cannot talk about Intelligent Enterprise without talking about RISE with SAP, the latest business transformation as a service (BTaaS) offering from SAP. For many businesses, the transition will be a journey that is specific to their own experience. RISE with SAP includes one bundle of products and services that help businesses start their journey at their own pace and on their own terms. First, the offering includes the market-leading SAP S/4HANA Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP BTP as the technological foundation platform, and SAP Business Network with access to over 5 million connected businesses in the network.

Together with the ecosystem, RISE with SAP includes services and tools for business process design, cloud migrations, application lifecycle management, and learning content with SAP Enable Now.

RISE with SAP helps companies to accelerate their journey and transition to Intelligent Enterprise.

Summary

We have now learned about Intelligent Enterprise and SAP’s offerings for businesses to become intelligent enterprises through digital transformations. Through this chapter, we have learned about Intelligent Suite and Industry Cloud, Business Network, Sustainability Management, XM, and integration that comprise integrated business processes that span across multiple solutions and suite qualities to ensure consistent UXs.

In the next chapter, we will discuss the role of SAP BTP as the platform for Intelligent Enterprise and its core capabilities.

2

SAP Business Technology Platform Overview

In the last chapter, we learned about the Intelligent Enterprise framework and how the components and capabilities are brought together to support businesses to become intelligent enterprises that are more resilient, profitable, and sustainable.

While SAP applications enable integrated business processes, companies will require additional flexibility to integrate with existing IT landscapes and extend SAP applications to industry-or company-specific needs. SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is the platform for the intelligent enterprise to provide such flexibility, deliver business value through integration and extension, and transform data into value. It also enables different developer personnel to build innovations from a fully flexible programming model to a low-code/no-code model.

In this chapter, we will walk through the technologies behind SAP BTP and give you an overview of the capabilities of SAP BTP and what kind of use cases they support. As we will focus on the breadth of the platform first, there will be many products or terminologies being introduced. If something happens to be new to you, don’t worry, we will explain it when we introduce it the first time or explain it in depth in later chapters. So, it is time for us to discuss the following topics:

Why SAP BTP is differentSAP BTP technology capabilities

Why SAP BTP is different

In a nutshell, SAP BTP is the platform of Intelligent Enterprise that provides technology capabilities that help businesses to achieve agility, integration, extension, and creation of value from data. SAP BTP was first introduced in 2019, built on the legacy of SAP Cloud Platform, but it combined all other technology offerings from SAP to finally become a platform that is unified, business-centric, and open.

Unified

SAP BTP is evolving to be a unified platform with a clear focus on business challenges. It brings together all the technology offerings from SAP on one platform. Based on the goal of unification, SAP decided to sunset the SAP Cloud Platform product name and merged the capabilities into SAP BTP, for example, SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite is renamed SAP Integration Suite.

A unified platform offers a unified experience for customers. SAP is continuing to expand the value of SAP BTP by offering a simplified user experience and out-of-the-box integration and interoperability between SAP applications and technology. The unified platform also provides a consistent commercial model, a simplified platform cockpit, and a catalog of cloud services consumable for different runtimes.

Business-centric

SAP BTP focuses on improving business outcomes and increases business-centricity by being tailored to applications and business processes. It is positioned for use cases along the key integration scenarios mentioned in the previous chapter and enables joint suite-like qualities across the applications, such as a harmonized look and feel, and consistent security and identity management.

The platform includes a semantic layer of business data. The SAP One Domain Model is the common data model that standardizes the key business objects across SAP applications. It is already used in the SAP Master Data Integration service for many master data objects, such as customers, workforce people, suppliers, products, and cost centers. The common data model is also serving as the foundation for APIs and business events, such as SAP Graph, as the simplified and unified API layer for Intelligent Enterprise scenarios. As SAP BTP evolves, the SAP One Domain Model will become more extensible and consumable.

Furthermore, SAP BTP can help companies to gain insights and generate value from data in a business context. It offers semantic data management capabilities through SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, to connect enterprise data and break data silos. It automates the process of data integration and life cycle management and delivers cross-product analytics and dashboards to support data-driven decision-making.

SAP BTP also provides built-in security and compliance to ensure data security and privacy for business-critical information. It offers capabilities to help companies to manage enterprise-wide integrations across heterogeneous environments, including their existing IT and hybrid landscapes. SAP Integration Suite as part of SAP BTP can connect and contextualize processes and data, with more than 2,000 pre-configured integration packs.

Open

SAP BTP is an open platform and builds on collaboration with partners and an open ecosystem.

Firstly, SAP BTP runs on top of multiple cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layers, for both SAP data centers and through partner cloud infrastructures that give customers flexibility and choice. It offers a consumption-based commercial offering with different payment options and a free tier model to enable access to the broader SAP ecosystem at their pace of adoption.

Secondly, SAP BTP will enable direct access to a growing marketplace where partners and ecosystem participants can build, release, and monetize their solutions directly on the platform, and customers can easily consume them within one commercial model.

Lastly, SAP embraces and actively contributes to open source communities. Open projects Gardener and Kyma are such examples. Gardener is an open source project for multi-cloud infrastructure on top of Kubernetes. Kyma is a cloud-native extension platform. We will cover the details of Gardener and Kyma in a later chapter.

SAP BTP technology capabilities

SAP BTP brings together a comprehensive set of technical capabilities and solutions, (which includes database and data management, analytics, application development and integration, and intelligent technologies) into one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments. Figure 2.1 illustrates how SAP BTP fits into the Intelligent Enterprise framework described in the previous chapter:

Figure 2.1: SAP BTP in Intelligent Enterprise

Now, let’s get into the details of the technology offerings in each area, starting with database and data management.

Database and data management

Organizations today are faced with the mandate of leveraging all the data assets to optimize business processes. The ability to collect, manage, and analyze data in real time is essential to compete in the digital economy. SAP’s database and data management solutions help to manage enterprise data for their data-driven transformation and priorities. It includes offerings of SAP HANA, SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Data Intelligence Cloud, and more.

SAP HANA

SAP HANA is one of the first in-memory data platforms to handle both online analytics processing (OLAP) and online transactional processing (OLTP) together in a single system simultaneously on the same dataset with unparallel performance. This is important as it enables running complex analytical operations in real time based on the latest information, without replicating data.

Even though SAP HANA is well known as an in-memory columnar relational database management system (RDBMS), it has been taken a step further and provides built-in multi-mode support to store and process data types, such as geospatial, text, graphical, JSON, and time-series data. It also offers advanced search and analytics capabilities, as well as data integration capabilities for all types of data. By applying the built-in advanced capacities such as spatial analysis, text mining, predictive analytics, and machine learning, you can build new types of applications to meet your specific needs and achieve a faster time-to-value. The ability to process different types of data and workloads on a single system also helps to simplify the IT landscapes and reduce operational complexities.

Gaining a unified view of all enterprise data becomes more complex with growing data volumes. It is no longer feasible for a modern enterprise to physically aggregate data into one location. SAP HANA provides native data integration and federation with Smart Data Integration and Smart Data Access, to create a single logical view of data based on a unified security model. Besides, SAP HANA provides intelligent recommendations to simplify administrative tasks such as SQL optimization, data tiering, and monitoring. These capabilities enable a more agile and cost-efficient way to manage data. To support business continuity and high availability, SAP HANA supports a distributed scalable architecture with advanced multi-temperature and data life cycle management capabilities. Active and standby replicas can be deployed in geographically distributed locations for read access, load balancing, and failover through infrastructure automation.

In addition, SAP HANA provides embedded machine learning functions through the Predictive Analysis Library (PAL) and Automated Predictive Library (APL). PAL provides the library with functions in the areas of clustering, classification, regression, time-series analysis, and statistics. APL provides automated predictive functions to generate regression and clustering models based on the dataset, which is simple to use for casual users.

Introduced in 2011, SAP HANA is now used by more than 54,000 customers to manage their critical enterprise data. SAP has also moved the majority of its Intelligent Suite applications off legacy databases onto SAP HANA, including SAP S/4HANA, SAP Ariba solutions, SAP SuccessFactors solutions, and SAP Customer Experience solutions. By doing so, applications can reunify the OLTP and OLAP with a simplified data model and leverage the speed of in-memory processing. For example, SAP Ariba solutions have improved UI response time by 40% on average, with 10 times improvement in search performance. SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite runs on SAP HANA to enable unified reporting directly on source data with no latency. Query performance has been significantly improved. Besides, simplification of data models increases the speed of innovation.

To summarize, SAP HANA enables organizations to make better business decisions, innovate, deliver new services to their customers, simplify IT, and optimize operational costs. Most Intelligent Suite applications are running on HANA, which enables better integration with a simplified data model and makes cross-product analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) possible based on connected data. Figure 2.2 summarizes the capabilities of SAP HANA:

Figure 2.2: SAP HANA capabilities overview

SAP HANA Cloud

SAP HANA Cloud is a data platform-as-a-service that offers SAP HANA natively in the cloud. SAP HANA Cloud inherits the capabilities of SAP HANA to store and process various types of data. In addition, it provides native data tiering with SAP HANA Cloud, Data Lake, and high-volume transaction processing with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. HANA Cloud also scales compute and storage resources separately and accesses data according to business needs for performance and provides more flexibility to manage costs.

SAP HANA Cloud includes the following components:

SAP HANA Cloud – SAP HANA Database is the in-memory database for multi-model data processing that supports OLAP and OLTP in one system.SAP HANA Cloud – Data Lake is a fully managed cloud service for securely storing and analyzing large amounts of data that is infrequently updated. It leverages inexpensive storage options to lower costs while maintaining excellent performance and full SQL access to data. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) is a fully managed cloud service that enables extreme OLTP workloads in addition to real-time analytical capabilities. The ASE service is fully integrated with shared security and tenancy models, as well as development and monitoring tools. The cloud-native architecture of the ASE service efficiently accommodates independent and elastic scaling of both storage and compute power to handle extreme transaction processing and complex query workloads for many concurrent users.SAP HANA Cloud – SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise Replication (ASE Replication) is a high-performance replication system that synchronizes transactional data across ASE instances.

As a managed offering from SAP, you can benefit from guaranteed availability provided by SAP, scale system load based on business needs, and simplified operations such as backup and recovery, and upgrade. SAP HANA Cloud can be accessed through a variety of languages and libraries, such as Java (JDBC), .NET (ADO.NET), Go, Python, and JavaScript. You can create models using tools provided with SAP Business Application Studio, expose data using OData, and bind with applications running on SAP BTP environments. Figure 2.3 illustrates how SAP HANA Cloud connects with data sources and consuming applications:

Figure 2.3: Overview of connections to SAP HANA Cloud

Analytics

Analytics solutions as part of SAP BTP provide capabilities to connect and process all types of data. They enable companies to establish a single source of truth with cloud data warehousing, visualize insights with intuitive business intelligence (BI), drive better business outcomes with collaborative enterprise planning, and turn insights into action with automated workflow and augmented analytics powered by AI. In this section, we will highlight SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP Analytics Cloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for analytics that includes BI, enterprise planning, and augmented analytics. This is important, as now businesses can have connected data to make confident decisions. In a nutshell, SAP Analytics Cloud includes the following core components:

Business intelligence: A powerful combination of BI and analytics enables use cases to range from self-service data discovery and visualization, enterprise reporting at scale, embedded analytics for in-context insights, new analytical applications, and mobile consumption.Enterprise planning: To improve accuracy and efficiency for use cases such as budgeting, revenue forecasting, finance, workforce, and predictive planning. Users can simulate and run what-if scenarios to evaluate the pros and cons and determine the best way forward. Augmented analytics: Augmented with AI and predictive analytics to drive insights and improve decision-making, and achieved through a series of Smart features. The Smart features include Smart Predict to build actionable predictions, Search to Insights to enter questions in conversational language to get answers instantly, Smart Insights to focus on impact and contributor analysis for selected KPIs, and Smart Discovery to analyze patterns to identify outliers for anomaly detection.

SAP Analytics Cloud runs on top of SAP HANA databases, and users can perform real-time analytics on transactional data virtually through live connectivity. This helps users to view data instantly, and companies can rely on a single source of truth. Embedded analytics are available for SAP’s Intelligent Suite cloud applications, which allows these applications to do reporting on live transactional data directly. For example, SAP SuccessFactors solutions have embedded SAP Analytics Cloud within existing workflows and enable HR professionals to better understand hiring, performance, attrition, and diversity, and to connect how people will impact business results.

Data can come from anywhere, and most businesses will have their own specific datasets. SAP Analytics Cloud, together with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud, supports the ability to connect and combine data across enterprise landscapes. This enables organizations to incorporate analytics into existing business processes and accelerate time-to-value with out-of-the-box integration capabilities.

Figure 2.4: SAP Analytics Cloud overview

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, meanwhile, is a new offering for data warehousing in the cloud that combines data management processes with advanced analytics. It is built on the powerful SAP HANA Cloud and works seamlessly with SAP Analytics Cloud.

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud provides a flexible, cloud-based option for the enterprise data warehouse, and is also designed to empower the line of business for self-service analytics through a business semantic layer. It supports a federate-first approach to reduce or completely avoid upfront data movement and a wide range of connectivity to SAP and non-SAP data sources. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud data objects are exposed as tables and views and can be integrated with external data pipelines and analytics tools. Typical scenarios for using SAP Data Warehouse Cloud include the following:

Self-service data modeling and analytics by empowering line of business users via Spaces following the governance policies defined by administrators.Enable data democratization and lower the adoption barrier with a business semantic layer that abstracts from underneath physical data sources and accelerates time-to-insights.Enterprise data warehousing by leveraging SQL skills, built-in data transformation capabilities, as well as third-party and open source tooling for data integration and data processing. It also supports hybrid scenarios such as integration with SAP BW/4HANA (InfoCubes, Queries, and CompositeProviders) to ensure the reusability of BW data or other existing on-premises investments.

The Spaces concept in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is the central element that provides the necessary isolation and enables collaboration between lines of business (LoBs) and IT to achieve the synthesis of data agility. Enterprise Spaces define and provide governed company-wide standards that can be extended in the departmental and individual Spaces using the same modeling mechanisms of the data and business layer. The individual data objects are only visible within their own Spaces. The data privacy and security rules are space-specific and support the fine granular definition of rules using row-level security. Auditing and activity logs are also supported at the object level.

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud’s Data and Business Modeling services enable users to navigate data. First, the View Editor and Data Flow Editor are used for data modeling by defining connectivity to data sources and implementing complex data integration and transformation logic. Business Builder is the UI that allows data previews with filtering, sorting, profiling, data quality analysis, and basic data lineage. Some of the functionalities that come from SAP Data Intelligence are integrated as a cloud-based software service directly into SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

As mentioned earlier, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is closely integrated with SAP Analytics Cloud. Customers who already have a standalone instance of SAP Analytics Cloud can connect directly to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud’s data objects. The two solutions provide a unified look and feel and share the same sets of common services, such as user management, and are delivered from the same data centers. Figure 2.5 is a high-level overview of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud:

Figure 2.5: SAP Data Warehouse Cloud overview

Application development and integration

The application development and integration capabilities of SAP BTP help companies to simplify application development, accelerate integration, automate business processes, and enable full flexibility to meet business needs on an extensible technology platform. As part of the solution package, SAP Integration Suite connects applications and data from SAP and third-party sources with prebuilt flows. SAP Extension Suite simplifies application development using flexible no-code, low-code, and pro-code capabilities to rapidly build and enhance SAP applications and increase development productivity and engagement through a harmonized digital experience.

SAP Integration Suite

SAP Integration Suite combines integration capabilities such as Process Integration, API Management, Integration Advisor, and Open Connectors into a cohesive and simplified toolkit for enterprise integrations. It supports a variety of integration needs including business process optimization and automation, regulatory compliance, and creating new business models leveraging APIs. SAP Integration Suite is the integration layer of SAP BTP.

As you may experience in IT projects, you know a significant amount of time is spent building integrations; that is where the integration packs come to play and accelerate time to results. In SAP Integration Suite, there are more than 2,000 integration packs, 500 documented events, and 225 business process blueprints as part of API Business Hub, which provides a central place to find pre-packaged contents (APIs and integration packs) that contain multiple integration flows that customers can leverage with a few configuration changes, for example, connectivity settings. SAP Integration Suite also includes the Open Connectors capability for non-SAP connectivity, with more than 160 pre-built connectors to third-party solutions via harmonized RESTful APIs. API Management within SAP Integration Suite supports life cycle management of APIs – from design, development, management, and usage analytics to engagement with your developer community, or even monetizing APIs through digital marketplaces. These capabilities help to democratize access to integration and empower business users as citizen integrators to build or reuse integration flows for people with diverse skill sets, rather than fully relying on central IT.

Event Mesh provides the event-driven integration capability. An application can publish a business event. The messaging layer reliably delivers the event for any consumer who subscribes to that and can react accordingly. This enables a loosely coupled architecture that is required for integrating systems or services with a microservices architecture. Today, there are more than 500 published business events from SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors solutions, SAP Customer Experience solutions, and more.

Integration Advisor helps to simplify the implementation and maintenance of integration through AI and machine learning. It provides an intelligent content management system that includes a data dictionary with metadata models of APIs and integration contents and a repository of implementation guidelines. It also offers crowdsourcing capabilities for interfaces and mappings and captures them in the knowledge base. By using machine learning and AI, Integration Advisor can automatically generate documentation, mapping guidelines, runtime artifacts, and validation rules for specific integration requirements.

Integration is the key to enabling Intelligent Enterprise, and SAP Integration Suite plays a significant role in integrating both technology and business processes to deliver value by accelerating innovation or reducing the complexity of operations. SAP Integration Suite includes the prebuilt integration packs to support the key business processes, such as lead to cash, source to pay, recruit to retire, and design to operate:

Figure 2.6: SAP Integration Suite overview

SAP Extension Suite

As businesses are moving toward modern technologies and the cloud through digital transformation, maintaining existing applications while adopting emerging technologies becomes an increasingly complex task. SAP Extension Suite provides the necessary capabilities to improve development efficiency and productivity, and support different developer personas for citizens, LoB, or professional developers. With pre-built templates, enterprise-grade frameworks, ready-to-use technical and business services, and standard APIs, developers can build application extensions more quickly, from leveraging low-code/no-code capabilities with fewer IT dependencies to having the flexibility to choose a development approach and runtimes that fit their needs.

There are mainly three types of extensibilities for SAP applications:

Classic extensibility is the traditional method used to extend applications based on SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) and SAP Business Suite applications. It is tightly coupled, and the customization code usually resides in the Z-namespace directly. Developers and consultants use customization and extension technologies such as ABAP, SAP GUI, and Web Dynpro.In-app extensibility was introduced with SAP S/4HANA. It provides the extension framework for building SAP Fiori-based customizations within the SAP S/4HANA system and works with SAP S/4HANA data and processes only.Side-by-side extensibility enables decoupled extensions. It helps to extend the business processes while keeping the core clean. It also allows developers to adopt the latest technologies and innovations, such as machine learning and AI, reusable business, and technical services.

Side-by-side extensibility is supported by SAP BTP through SAP Extension Suite, to enable businesses to address their business requirements in a modern way and innovate by adopting the latest technologies. The capabilities and use cases for SAP Extension Suite can be categorized into the following:

Digital experience: This provides tools to help organizations to build and run applications that provide a consistent and engaging user experience through SAP Fiori-based web applications, mobile applications, and conversational bots. It also includes tools to enable end users to create business content and collaboration such as SAP Work Zone.Development efficiency: This offers capabilities to help developers rapidly build extensions and new applications. It includes low-code, graphical development tools, and programming frameworks such as SAP Business Application Studio and SAP Cloud Application Programming Model, which can help to increase development efficiency while ensuring consistent user experience. Multiple runtimes and frameworks are provided to meet different needs, such as Cloud Foundry, function-as-a-service through Extension Factory, and Enterprise Messaging to support event-driven service-oriented architecture. It also offers a low-code/no-code platform including the capabilities acquired through AppGyver.Digital process automation: This offers capabilities to automate, adapt, and improve business processes. With the intuitive and business user-friendly tools, users can leverage prebuilt templates to customize their processes or build new ones for their specific business needs. SAP Workflow Management and SAP Intelligent Robotics Process Automation (iRPA) are in this category.

Figure 2.7 gives an overview of the use cases and capabilities that SAP Extension Suite supports:

Figure 2.7: SAP Extension Suite overview

Intelligent technologies

With the use of AI, organizations can get better insights to make better decisions, adopt business processes in real time by combining learnings from historic data, automate process steps, and free users from repetitive tasks.

AI is a cornerstone of the Intelligent Enterprise strategy. AI is infused into applications and business processes natively in SAP’s Intelligent Suite applications. Through the embedded AI functionalities, customers can consume them directly as part of the standard applications. AI models are provided by SAP either as pre-trained models or trained on customers’ own data. In this way, it simplifies the adoption and helps to bring AI to more users. Here are a few examples of SAP applications with AI embedded:

SAP S4/HANA: This identifies slow-moving stock, reduces inventory carrying and warehouse management costs, and automates sales order creation from unstructured documents to speed up the process and improve quality.SAP Concur: This extracts information from documents such as user expense receipts and speeds up the entering and processing to provide a better user experience and reduce manual work.SAP Service Cloud: This automates ticket management by providing ticket classification and solution recommendations based on natural language processing (NLP).

SAP offers AI technology directly by exposing business services via SAP BTP for customers and ecosystem partners to extend SAP systems and create custom applications. These exposed AI capabilities are offered through AI Foundation, AI Business Services, SAP Conversational AI, and SAP iRPA:

AI Core and AI Launchpad are the foundation for customers and partners to manage and extend SAP’s AI capabilities. AI Core offers a robust and advanced environment for serving and training and allows unified consumption of AI content. It provides an upgraded architecture based on Kubernetes and serverless that is highly scalable. AI Launchpad is a new service that provides a central place to manage machine learning operations and life cycle management of the models.SAP Conversational AI is a low-code/low-touch chatbot building platform, with capabilities to build, train, test, and manage intelligent AI-powered chatbots to simplify business tasks and workflows across SAP and non-SAP products and improve user experience. SAP Conversational AI uses word-class NLP to analyze text inputs and compose responses to user queries.iRPA uses intelligent bots to automate repetitive manual processes and help people and organizations to redirect resources to high-value activities and processes. As a result, customers can save time and costs, and reduce human errors.SAP AI Business Services