10 Reasons You Should Run SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) on AWS

By Ferry Mulyadi, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Sumit Goyal, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Anil Nallamotu, Sr. Manager, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is a unified, business-centric, and open platform for the entire SAP ecosystem. It is available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and enables users to integrate and create value from data and extend their SAP and third-party solution landscapes to meet evolving business needs.

This post will provide 10 considerations and details for why you should run SAP BTP on AWS. It will benefit you as an SAP customer to get the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and fastest time to value.

#1 – Platform of Choice and Innovation

AWS is the first and chosen platform for launching new SAP cloud services offerings. In 2012, SAP introduced the HANA Cloud Platform (also known as SAP NetWeaver Cloud) and SAP HANA One Portal, the first public cloud solution for HANA One instances made available on AWS.

It offered a web-based management console for managing SAP HANA instances deployed on AWS. This was the first known SAP BTP service available on public cloud.

As of May 2023, the SAP Discovery Center lists 90+ services of which 80+ are available on AWS. New SAP BTP services released in 2022 are all available on AWS, while only two are available on other hyperscalers.

A subset of SAP BTP services that are only available on AWS as of May 2023 are as follows:

SAP BTP services with more regions availability on AWS as of May 2023:

#2 – Reduce Custom Code within Core SAP ERP

According to market research done by America SAP User Group (ASUG 2021), over 91% of customers rely on custom code to enable essential business processes, and 57% have more than half their critical business processes depending on custom SAP interfaces.

Custom interfaces and custom code requires significant effort, time, and cost in SAP implementations and maintenance to test and remediate during SAP upgrades. By embracing the clean core methodology, you can move these custom codes outside of the core SAP ERP, thus reducing overall TCO.

There are several tools you can use to start with the simplification of custom code:

• SAP Innovation and Optimization Pathfinder on Spotlight provides tailored innovation recommendations, based on industry benchmarks and available options, to optimize SAP solutions (on SAP ECC and S/4HANA). The section “Optimize I.T > Custom Code” (slide 137 in the sample report) provides the CPU and database time utilized by custom code as a percentage of the total available CPU.
• SAP Readiness Check provides a custom code analysis report and their compatibility with the target S/4HANA system.
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Extensibility Options have key user extensibility with two options: on-stack developer extensibility (embedded steampunk), and side-by-side extensibility (using SAP BTP ABAP Environment). The SAP BTP ABAP Environment is key to building loosely-coupled S/4HANA extensibility applications that can reduce complexity at core SAP ERP, thus reducing TCO in the long run. Side-by-side extensibility with SAP BTP ABAP Environment is only available on AWS.

#3 – Improve Productivity for Business Experts and Key Users

For business experts and key users, who have strong knowledge of SAP business processes and not necessarily deep development skills, SAP recommends using SAP Build Apps and SAP Build Process Automation that are only available on AWS. These encourage citizen development and induce possibility to federate custom development within an organization, thus building new capability to explore new business benefits.

• SAP Build Apps helps in creating custom user interface (UI) applications or mobile apps, with a user-friendly visual development environment. Applications built using SAP Build Apps can be used on web, iOS, or Android without any redesign.
• SAP Build Process Automation helps to automate repetitive manual processes by creating, scheduling, managing, and monitoring intelligent bots.

#4 – Optimize End-to-End Business Processes

An upgrade or migration to S/4HANA is a good opportunity to assess inefficiencies and non-compliance in business processes within the company. When you perform just a technical upgrade, this means the bottlenecks in the order to cash, procure to pay, or accounting processes would continue to exist in the new system.

SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite are only available on AWS and provides modelling capability to map process flows and business process integrations with the help of pre-built content. With real-time monitoring of the process flow, bottlenecks and impact can be visualized, while simulations with remodeled process flows and impact assessment can be done on the process landscape.

Feedback and approvals can be obtained from various stakeholders through the new process lifecycle.

#5 – Amazon EC2 Graviton for HANA Cloud and Datasphere

SAP Datasphere is a persona-driven, fully-managed data warehouse solution with integrations with various SAP BTP services and SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC).

Datasphere Cloud uses the SAP HANA Cloud, a fully managed in-memory cloud database-as-a-service for multi-temperature data storage—in memory and disk (native storage extension)—as a relational data lake. It offers the ability to access data without having to replicate it through data virtualization.

SAP announced at AWS re:Invent 2021 a strategic initiative to port SAP HANA Cloud onto ARM-based AWS Graviton processors that deliver the best price-performance for cloud workloads running in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

#6 – Embedded Analytics for Real-Time Analytics and Planning

SAP offers its analytics solution, SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), in three variants: SAP Analytics Cloud, Embedded Edition; SAP Analytics Cloud; and SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning.

SAP Analytics Cloud Embedded Edition accesses the ABAP CDS views within SAP S/4HANA using live connection which enables real-time analytics. It leverages the transient analytical queries generated automatically for the ABAP CDS views.

The Virtual Data Model built using ABAP CDS enables views to be reused, thereby reducing effort and improved performance. This also eliminate the need of data extraction and replication.

SAP Analytics Cloud UIs are embedded in iFrames and published on the Fiori Launchpad, offering a seamless experience for SAP business users without having to rely on any external analytical applications. SAP Analytics Cloud, Embedded Edition is only available on AWS.

#7 – Enterprise Analytics and Planning

SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud for Data Analysis and Planning can be applied within the business application like S/4HANA. It’s accessible to business users without having to duplicate the data and access through other analytical/planning applications.

SAP Analytics Cloud offers workflows to route data, analyze trends, and take actions, all through the same UI.

# 8 – Cloud-Native Data Warehouse for SAP BW and BW/4HANA Customers

SAP BW Bridge is a feature of SAP Datasphere that offers the possibility of an ABAP-based extraction and staging capabilities to migrate SAP BW and BW/4HANA Data.

SAP activate methodology provides a roadmap for a tool-supported move of SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA investments to SAP Datasphere using the SAP BW Bridge, through a shell conversion. It currently supports accessing the existing SAP BW models, transformations, and customizations in the SAP Datasphere by using the SAP BTP ABAP Environment runtime. SAP BW Bridge is available only on AWS

# 9 – Only Cloud Service Provider Solutions Recommended by SAP Roadmaps

AWS offers the widest coverage of SAP’s public cloud and BTP services as recommended in the product roadmaps. This makes transition from an on-premises landscape to cloud simpler and easier to manage for SAP customers.

The following table describes the SAP product roadmap naming that are supported on AWS:

#10 – Only CSP Offering All RISE with S/4HANA Cloud Entitlements

RISE with SAP is a single contract, business transformation-as-a-service offer for customers to use S/4HANA as a private cloud (single tenant) or in a public cloud (multi-tenant). ‘

The RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud private edition includes access to the following SAP BTP services by default. This makes SAP BTP on AWS the most complete offering for SAP customers.

Conclusion

You can see why choosing SAP Business Technology (BTP) on AWS is the best option and provides customers the broadest available SAP BTP services and widest deployment globally in AWS regions.

When you choose to run SAP S/4HANA (or RISE with SAP on AWS) and SAP BTP on AWS, you’ll have a more secure architecture, avoid additional data egress charges, faster performance, and no extra storage costs—because all of the instances are running within AWS global network.

Further, by combining SAP BTP and AWS services using the AWS and SAP Joint Reference Architecture principle, you can unlock new business possibilities and create new value. It will differentiate your organization against the competition as you’ll be leveraging the best of both worlds.