SAP Business Technology Platform Provides $195,000 Average Annual Benefits per 100 Users, According to IDC Study

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IDC recently asked SAP customers using SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) to assess the impact of their BTP adoption on existing SAP environments. The study highlighted the significant value that organizations can realize by running their applications with SAP BTP to drive automation and integration and increase the application's functionality.

Benefits for organizations include cost savings, staff efficiencies, and business operational gains:

• $195,100 annual benefits per 100 users


• 495% three-year ROI


• 6-month payback period

The Business Value of SAP BTP

SAP BTP customers highlighted the benefits in terms of empowering teams responsible for creating value through the use of data, ensuring faster completion of projects, capturing cross-organizational efficiencies through automation, and realizing cost savings and staff efficiencies. The benefits are in four main areas:

• Analytics and data benefits: Organizations said SAP BTP enabled them to move data more fluidly while also improving data quality. Having a single source of information with SAP BTP resulted in higher data quality and supported the teams relying on the data. Organizations reported 47% fewer reports with poor data quality and 29% more accurate data. One customer said: "Our logistics workers now have at their fingertips information through SAP BTP whereas they would otherwise have had to go back to their workstation, scan in take-out preposition spreadsheets, and even manually enter information in the system. Now, with SAP BTP, they know at their fingertips exactly what to do with information and where it needs to go."

• Integration and development benefits: SAP BTP also enables organizations to provide richer and timelier functionality to their businesses through deep integration and automation and the ability to leverage new and more efficient approaches. Organizations reported 31% faster completion of projects and 19% higher productivity in development teams. A customer said: "We use SAP BTP as a platform for innovation and services and to enhance our core processes. If we have a functional need that might be complex to enhance in our existing on-premises environment, then we use SAP BTP services to build up the service and integrate into our landscape."

• Intelligent process and automation benefits: Enhanced automation capabilities with SAP BTP, including the use of AI-driven automation, enable organizations to automate more processes that previously consumed significant amounts of staff time or created potential business risk through manual errors. Automating business processes with SAP BTP has helped organizations to streamline their operations and save time for teams responsible for day-to-day business activities. Organizations reported 63% fewer business processes with errors and 21 hours saved per SAP user per year. A SAP customer said: "We're taking some repetitive tasks from our employees to give them the chance to work on higher-value tasks with SAP BTP. For the user, they are getting more efficient with SAP BTP. All the applications we implement will lead to efficiency increases in the user department — for example, automating processes by providing new functionality and supporting them and their decisions, or just through automation."

• Cost infrastructure benefits: Customers said their SAP ecosystem enablement was more cost-effective and efficient with SAP BTP. They said moving to the cloud with SAP BTP has enabled them to avoid hardware and related costs associated with running on-premises environments and to take advantage of SAP management and updates of BTP services.Customers reported almost $400,000 average savings per year on infrastructure, licensing, and other direct costs when running their SAP environments and a 36% efficiency improvement for IT infrastructure teams. According to one customer: "Before SAP BTP, we had a gateway and portal system that cost hundreds of thousands of euros, and we've saved most of that with SAP BTP."

Unlocking Business Value in a Digital-First World

The past two years have been an unprecedented time for digital technologies, which have been at the forefront of enabling business transformation. As a result, overall digital maturity has accelerated. If digital technologies were seen as an enabler of business transformation, now they have become imperative to thrive amid the uncertainty and keep up with the increased speed of change. We are now living in what IDC defines as a digital-first world, in which digital is the primary lever that CEOs and C-suites use to solve business challenges, manage risks, and deliver on organizations' key missions and priorities.

To support this, technology architectures need to become more flexible, extensible, open, and directly linked to concrete business challenges and outcomes. As a result, platform architectures linked to horizontal and industry-specific digital use cases are taking center stage. It is critical that buyers look for a technology partner that enables digital business value creation, while providing solution flexibility and interoperability.

Before making purchasing decisions on their digital business platform, organizations should consider the following:

• Put business outcomes first


• Assess the skills gap


• Secure full integration


• Strive for data analytics and automation


• Create a collaborative "digital dream team" across C-suite leaders

SAP BTP is a cloud-native, comprehensive, interoperable platform that enables app development, data and analytics, integration, and AI capabilities.

To learn more, you can access the full IDC Business Value of SAP Business Technology Platform white paper here. You can also follow the SAP Business Technology Platform topic page.