With the Business Technology Platform, SAP aims to create a single common layer for all its processes. What does this mean in practice?
Mark Smith, CRO for Business Technology Platform (BTP), speaks at SAP NOW in Rotterdam about the importance of AI for industry. Smith, who joined SAP after a long career at Microsoft, emphasizes that he was immediately drawn to SAP’s current product portfolio.
He explains how customers still often see SAP as just an ERP provider. “People mainly know SAP as their financial and inventory management system,” he says. “But we’re far beyond that now. SAP has evolved into a complete business suite that supports all core processes of a modern enterprise – from finance and supply chain to HR, customer relations, and data analytics.”
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Continuous Evolution
According to Smith, SAP’s ERP core is just one layer of the solutions it offers. Around that core is the Business Technology Platform (BTP): the technology platform on which all modern SAP applications are built.
BTP serves as the foundation for compliance, governance, and innovation capabilities. Smith emphasizes that recent product announcements prove this. “Ariba NextGen is built on BTP. Supply Chain Orchestration is built on BTP. Business Network is built on BTP,” he explains. For him, it’s a major step that the key business applications now run on the same platform.
AI and Automation
A large part of SAP’s innovation revolves around AI. Smith refers to recent announcements for Joule, SAP’s AI assistant. “Embedded AI and the Joule assistant ensure that customers continuously receive new use cases that are immediately deployable,” he explains.
At the same time, he notes that certain business needs don’t fit into standard software. That’s why SAP is introducing Joule Custom Skills, Joule Agent Builder, and Joule Studio, among others. These allow companies to build their own AI assistants and agent-based automations. “It’s about letting customers determine their unique processes and how they want to automate them,” says Smith.
He shares the customer story of metal company AGIS. By automating 300 calculations, the company achieved a fivefold increase in productivity. “It sounds simple, but the time you save by automating such processes is enormous.”
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Clean core is fundamental
Smith repeatedly emphasizes that a ‘clean core’, meaning an ERP system that’s as standard as possible, is essential. BTP plays the role of a secure extension layer.
“The platform for scalability is really the foundation. Then comes the platform for innovation,” he explains. According to him, companies should be able to quickly test new ideas without massive investments. Low-code, automation, and AI on BTP make this possible.
Finally, he sees a third layer: the platform for business empowerment. There, companies, and even non-technical employees, can build their own applications and agents within the secure boundaries of SAP’s ecosystem. “Department heads don’t want to go to IT every time they need to make a small adjustment. With BTP, we provide that flexibility, but with proper governance and security.”
Completely Open
Smith, with over twenty years of Microsoft experience, doesn’t see BTP as a competitor to hyperscalers, but as a complement. “BTP and Azure are fully complementary,” he says. BTP works just as well with AWS and Google Cloud as with Azure, and combines both SAP and non-SAP data. The latter is becoming increasingly important as companies want to gain new insights using Knowledge Graph technology and AI models.
While SAP is working hard on its own offerings, BTP remains completely open. Smith emphasizes that “75 percent of all integrations within Integration Suite go to third parties”. Almost no company runs entirely on a single stack anymore, and SAP acknowledges this.
For him, it’s clear that BTP is not simply a platform, but the foundation on which SAP wants to strengthen its role as a major player in business software worldwide. “Without BTP, it’s like building a house without a foundation,” he concludes.
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