On Tuesday, July 18, we hosted the first ever "What's New in SAP BTP" live session. Our goal was to showcase recent innovations across the platform portfolio, and even though we had some technical hiccups (it happens to the best of us), I think we succeeded in demonstrating how SAP BTP can support you through various, complex use cases and make it look like a piece of cake!
If you missed the live session, worry not. What happens on YouTube, stays on YouTube.
Our product experts not only explained the innovations, they also showed the innovations. I'll try to recap the most important information below, but I highly encourage you to watch the video to really see these innovations in action.
You can also check out the slides shared during the session
here.
Application Development and Automation
Vanessa shared an update for SAP Build and SAP Enterprise Automation. For those of you unfamiliar with these terms, a summary:
SAP Build - create and extend enterprise apps, automate processes and design business sites using LCNC capabilities. Bridging the gap between business and IT.
I'd like to highlight 2 of the strategic priorities for 2023:
Governance & Lifecycle Management
Any development team will tell you that "just" creating the application is one piece of puzzle. Being able to manage Day 2 operations after the fact, is a whole other story. For 2023, we want to bring resiliency and performance measures, security enhancements, and new governance features to provide consistency, transparency, and full lifecycle management into LCNC development projects.
Integration
SAP BTP is THE choice for extending your SAP landscape. Why? Because we provide tight integration and out-of-box configuration with SAP applications. That's way SAP Build will continue to make it a priority to provide direct integration to SAP applications and make it the LCNC tool of choice for SAP.
Now, let's get to the road map highlights:
- Trigger workflows and automated processes based on business events in SAP Integration Suite
- Execute SAP Build Process Automation directly from SAP Signavio when inefficient business processes are detected
- Use SAP Business Accelerator Hub as your one-stop shop for pre-built content across SAP BTP with a new and improved content discovery experience.
SAP Enterprise Automation - Enhance, Improve, Integrate processes - all with SAP, leveraging AI capabilities
What's the highlight?
- Simplified access to business semantics thanks to this unified approach
- Focus on optimizing the End2End business processes (not just workflows or specific tasks)
How does SAP Enterprise Automation help companies do this? It breaks down the processes into subprocesses and then automates them individually. Afterwards, you can reassemble the entire business process, making them easier to manage and scale.
Another important topic to note is around business data. SAP enterprise applications, like SAP S/4HANA Cloud or SAP SuccessFactors already provide a rich semantical layer of business data. Thanks to SAP Integration Suite, you can access that data and consume it from your optimized business process
And Vanessa shared so much more... including a great demo for an automated onboarding experience (something we can all relate to and sometimes from both sides of the table)
Integration
SAP Integration Suite is SAP's hybrid integration platform for the Intelligent Enterprise. It comprises various capabilities that support different integration scenarios across hybrid, heterogeneous and huge landscapes. One of those capabilities is called Cloud Integration and supports end-to-end process integration. Markus M highlighted a new feature for Cloud Integration that makes it possible to inspect and understand the resource consumption of your integration content. In short, Inspect helps customers assess the overall resource situation, reveal and analyze usage trends, find hot spots and take action to remedy them.
Markus shared a comprehensive demo during his presentation. Check out the replay to see Inspect in action!
Integration Assessment is also part of SAP Integration Suite and as the name suggests, supports you in defining and governing your integration scenarios. It provides not only a guided approach, but also concrete recommendations for integration technologies that are suitable for your company's needs. Konstantin shared that we have expanded our portfolio of guiding content to include the SAP Customer Experience portfolio. Concretely, this means you can select from a range of SAP Customer Experience solutions and receive integration technology recommendations. As well as, the support of application-specific policies that are used in SAP Sales and Service Cloud, for example.
Check out the video to find out how you can use Integration Assessment in your future integration projects!
Data & Analytics
In this call, we focused on SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition and the newly released features. This part of the session had some technical issues and we were not able to cover the entire scope of the new release. But, worry not, the content is available in a blog post published by Markus G here.
The highlights include:
Decentralized maintenance of core business partner data with duplicate prevention
For example, if you were to create a new supplier in SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance, the follow-up governance process can be handled by SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition. This includes checking if a record is already available. With this information, the data specialist can determine if this is a case of duplication and a "match and merge" can be completed with the existing active record. With this complete, the record passes the automated validation and is activated.
Create or enrich data from external sources
To support better automation in master data management, you can now compare business partner records in process with provided external source data. It's as simple as clicking "Look Up and Create".
This is just a simple summary of the amazing features in SAP MDG, cloud edition. Check out the blog post for a full overview and see it in action with the demo available here.
Security
Marko kicked off this segment talking about the new Delegated User Administration feature for SAP Cloud Identity Services. Why is this important? Customers needed more flexibility when assigning authorizations for the admin console of SAP Cloud Identity Services. Thanks to the implementation of a policy-based authorization management concept, this is now possible. Want to see how? Check out Marko's demo in the replay linked above!
Christian had a little less than 5 minutes to explain and show the new SAP Secure Login Service for SAP GUI, but he was completely up to the task! In a nutshell, you can integrate single sign-on for SAP GUI with cloud-based identity providers. How? This new service leverages the capabilities of non other than SAP Business Technology Platform. But don't take my word for it. Check out the replay and see this in action.
Want More?
The SAP Road Map Explorer is your one-stop shop for all SAP BTP innovations. You can easily check out the latest innovations and what is planned for the following quarters.
And if you have not heard of SAP BTP Innobytes, I suggest you check out this blog post with the 2023 episode recap. It's a monthly series for SAP BTP enthusiasts where we share up to 3 innovation highlights in just a few minutes. Perfect to get your monthly quota of SAP BTP updates!
