Companies are losing sight of the value SAP Business Technology Platform can bring to their business processes. BTP is a rapid ROI solution that enables users to integrate and produce value from data extending their SAP and third-party solution landscapes to meet business needs, businesses can:
- Compose End-to-End Business Processes with One Seamless Experience
- Create advanced insights and decide with confidence
- Personalise and Innovate Rapidly
- Make development as easy and intuitive as possible
SAP roadmap’s central plan is all future solutions will be based on S/4 HANA & Business Technology Platform. SAP’s CTO Juergen Miller stated that, “with the Business Technology Platform, we created the technology foundation for all of SAP’s applications.” This raises the question, why is there low brand awareness around BTP? Our SAP Specialists attended roundtables with SAP clients and found that BTP has a branding issue; SAP clients who have BTP on their shelves, do not know how to implement it.
This blog aims to provide an introductory level of knowledge into BTP and has extracted five key things you need to know about BTP.
1. BTP Free Tier Service
First things first, back in June 2021 SAP launched BTP Free Tier Service allowing you to use over thirty different services for free and integrate them into your business. Key services such as, Conversational AI, Central Launchpad, Mobile Services, RPA System and many more. So, where is the catch? Each free-tier service has a capacity limit on usage. For example, SAP Business Application Studio is limited to two developers; Kyma Runtime is limited to four CPUs; SAP Mobile Services is limited to three users each on ten applications. Once you reach the free tier capacity limit, you will be notified, and you can update to a standard plan in your SAP BTP Cockpit to continue utilising the service.
Free tier service is extremely limiting for their users, so how can users maximise BTP free tier with these constraints? Well, you have gained a pathway into developing proof of concepts at no cost. You can build, design, evaluate your business process solutions at no cost and pay when it’s completed. free tier provides a pathway for users to design solutions that would streamline their processes before committing to purchasing the SAP license, it is essentially a try before you buy.
SAP BTP has a vast number of services that can provide a range of various solutions for companies. Which ones stand out? In our opinion, central launchpad Service, Mobile Services and Conversational AI stand out the most.
Interested in signing up? Here are the steps to create your BTP Free Tier Account:
- Go to SAP Store
- Add Pay-As-You-Go for SAP BTP into cart
- Click Check Out
- Enter Your Credit Card Details to Verify
- Hit Confirm
A key question that has been raised is why you need to use a credit card if it is conveyed as free? Credit card information is required to verify your account, which includes the free tier capabilities for a subset of SAP BTP services. Providing your credit card also allows you to transfer work done in the free tier to production, as well as activate paid services immediately as desired. After signing the CPEA agreement, you can transition smoothly while retaining your global account. If you have an existing CPEA account, your account for Pay-As-You-Go for SAP BTP will transition to a separate account.
Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) aims to create a simple customer experience for finding, trying, buying, and consuming cloud services from SAP and partners for net-new and installed base customers. It allows customers to integrate, extend and innovate applications with business and technical functionality offered as cloud services in a flexible way.
2. Central Launchpad
The SAP Launchpad service enables organisations to establish a central point of access to SAP (e.g., SAP S/4HANA), custom-built, and third-party applications and extensions, both on the cloud and on-premise.
Application Integration
Provide users a central point of access for apps and tasks, with seamless integration to various UI technologies and third-party apps.
Intuitive and Engaging User Experience
A role-based, personalized launchpad with a flexible content structure that follows the SAP Fiori 3 design guidelines.
Integrations
Integration with central SAP BTP services, such as inbox and cloud identity services.
Extensibility
Extensible framework for customisations using shell plugins and custom branding.
3. Mobile Services
SAP Mobile Services enables you to develop, configure, and manage mobile applications that provide mobile access to enterprise data. Mobile Services’ key features include app content lifecycle management, push notifications for timely enterprise data updates, support for on-device storage of enterprise data (offline apps), app security, and app monitoring and usage reporting.
Mobile Services
Supports development for multiple app types, namely: native apps, cross-platform apps, web apps, and Mobile Development Kit clients. Define, manage, and monitor your apps through their entire life cycles.
App Updates
Intelligent update mechanisms keep your apps and app configurations up to date through optimised downloads and allow you to maintain multiple app versions in the field.
Work Offline
When offline, switch to the local data source, which is kept current via OData synchronisation features and open standards.
Security
Choose the authentication types that suit your data protection needs from multiple options.
App Updates
Intelligent update mechanisms keep your apps and app configurations up to date through optimised downloads and allow you to maintain multiple app versions in the field.
Work Offline
When offline, switch to the local data source, which is kept current via OData synchronisation features and open standards.
4. Conversational AI
Conversational AI offers a single intuitive interface to train, build, test, connect and monitor chatbots embedded into SAP and third-party solutions, a high-performing natural language processing (NLP) technology and low-code features, ensuring faster development. Simplify access to information and deliver personalised human-like conversations. Scale businesses by reducing development efforts, costs within support teams and enhance user satisfaction by automating tedious tasks.
Build your bot
Demonstrate skills to create adaptable bots in multiple languages. Set up triggers, requirements, and bot responses in rich messaging directly in the Bot Builder. Leverage the bot memory to provide human-like conversations.
Connect your bot
Connect chatbots to any SAP solution, external communication channel, or back-end system. Integrate a fallback channel so that conversations can be transferred from your bot to a human agent.
Monitor your bot
Understand how customers and employees talk to your chatbot and improve the user experience based on usage and training data through Log Feed, Usage Metrics and Training Analytics.
Version your bot
Form your bot and rapidly deploy it to specific environments. For example, produce a new version of your bot and assess it in a staging environment before transferring it to the production environment.
5. DalRae Solutions Business Technology Enablement Service
With this information and services at your fingertips, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin creating proofs-of-concept with the available services. This is where we come in; we are an accredited SAP Gold Partner who are recognised experts in user experience & HANA known for providing competitive advantages. Our service involves us setting up your free-tier account, connecting it to your SAP landscape and generating a central launchpad system and mobile service applications for you to work with.
Want to operate different services? No problem! Just let us know in your inquiry, and we will organise a meeting to have a chat! Want to learn more? Enquire now by emailing us at info@dalraesolutions.com.au and one of your team members will contact you ASAP.
