SAP BTP Holiday Calendar 2023
Michael Ameling
Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, SAP BTP | Head of Engineering & Experience, MD SAP Labs Dresden
It’s become a nice habit for me to take time before the beginning of the holiday season to look back and recap the year. 2023 has been another eventful year around all things SAP Business Technology Platform, with exciting announcements and great innovation. So, starting December 1, I will share a highlight each day until December 24 that gives you the chance to dive deeper into key SAP BTP-related topics.
But let me start with a heartfelt THANK YOU to all the talented teams who continue to work relentlessly on the SAP Business Technology Platform, delivering and developing for our customers and the SAP ecosystem every day. Let’s take the upcoming days and all the SAP BTP stories as a gallery-style repository for this year’s successes.
Best regards, Michael
24k customers are live on SAP BTP!
...and we have already more than 400 business applications and extensions developed on SAP BTP! Many of these business application projects have similar characteristics, and a standardized approach to implementing them on SAP BTP saves time and supports developer efficiency.
Based on their experience with successful business applications, the teams, with support from User Assistance, doubled down to condense best practices and technologies that can be safely recommended into comprehensive guides:
- The SAP BTP Guidance Framework is THE compass for architecting, implementing, and operating solutions on SAP BTP. This comprehensive framework includes decision guides, reference architectures, methodologies, and best practices to architects, developers, and administrators.
- The SAP BTP Developer’s Guide outlines the implementation of business applications on SAP BTP, designed to increase efficiency and build successful applications.
- New reference architectures have been released in the SAP Discovery Center, tailored to meet your specific technological and business needs.
Three valuable resources to bookmark so everyone developing solutions on BTP can stay up to date!
Steffen Pietsch Matthias Allgaier Katrin von Ahsen Konstantin Heine Raphael Schmitz Marco M. Fabian Lehmann Alexander Bange Steffen Eghardt Michael Czadankiewicz Dr. Ralf Ackermann
GenAI: beyond dinner-table conversations
The hype around Generative AI has reached every area of life this year - and SAP made the technology business-ready. Today, more than 24,000 of our customers have implemented over 130 AI use cases and there are more than 360 partner apps infused with AI available on the SAP Store.
We are investing in building our own foundation models and combining them with our deep understanding of business processes and SAP data. We announced our new generative AI assistant Joule, which will be embedded throughout the SAP cloud enterprise portfolio – a huge step toward AI becoming the norm for powering business processes. We’re creating an open enterprise AI ecosystem with the help of significant partnerships with Aleph Alpha , Anthropic , and Cohere . And we give developers instant access to a broad range of #LLMs from different providers via the Generative AI Hub in SAP AI Core.
To summarize all the whats, whys and hows of SAP’s Business IA strategy, we’ve created this 12-page whitepaper.
Juergen Mueller Jochen Schneider Dr. Felix von Reischach Julian Oellrich Rhishikesh Thakur Sean Kask Dr. Philipp Herzig Phil Loewen Walter Sun, Ph. D.
Quick BTP account setup with Terraform and SAP Discovery Center
With the increasing adoption of the SAP Business Technology Platform comes an increasing need to automate the setup of SAP BTP accounts. This year, we announced the Terraform provider for SAP BTP that enables SAP customers to automate the provisioning, management, and configuration of resources on #SAPBTP. On top of that, we added a “Quick Account Setup” feature in the SAP Discovery Center! With this feature, users can either launch an SAP BTP Booster to quickly set up an account for a mission or they can download the Terraform script that the Booster is using. This is of specific interest for DevOps teams who want to integrate such Terraform scripts into their CI/CD pipelines.
Very proud of what the team achieved from a first sketch in February 2023 until the actual delivery in November!
Rui Nogueira Jens Glander Sachit Aggarwal Sascha Scholz Markus Balsam Alexander Biskop Keshav Rai Kerstin Dyck
100 episodes of the SAP BTP Talk Podcast 🎧
Started in 2015, our product podcast SAP BTP Talk celebrated the milestone of the 100th episode together with Juergen Mueller, CTO and Executive Board Member at SAP SE. The podcast covers the latest SAP BTP news, roadmaps, and event highlights. Listeners get deep dives with SAP product experts into the different SAP BTP areas and learn more about customer and partner success stories.
This great achievement has only been made possible thanks to the support from our listeners and the SAP BTP Product Management and openSAP teams, who are the driving force behind it. Subscribe to the podcast on the platform of your choice and don’t miss the monthly episodes and share it with your network!
Juergen Mueller Steffen Pietsch Steffen Schad Hanna Salamon Niklas Siemer Gaurav Dey
Nurturing a collaborative environment for SAP BTP documentation with coDoc
It all started with the idea of asking users to communicate gaps in our documentation directly to our technical writers. From there, the BTP Experience team initiated the coDoc initiative, which proved to be an increasingly popular customer feedback channel for our user community. 90% of the feedback we received could be used to resolve 260 issues that were reported this year, which led to valuable improvements in the documentation! And the team is striving to make the entire process more streamlined and seamless for both the enablers and our customers. We also introduced contributor avatars and published even more doc sets, particularly for the new SAP BTP Developer’s Guide.
Watch this video to kick start your journey as a contributor and earn a badge while you are at it. Big thanks to everyone who has contributed to the coDoc initiative!
Integration is the foundation for innovation!
...that's why we continued also in 2023 to increase the integration footprint across SAP's product portfolio and shipped major innovations to our customers. Dr. Philipp Herzig 's SAP TechEd Business Application keynote gave great proof of that, showcasing recent innovations like SAP Start as the single-entry point into SAP applications, now fully integrated with Joule, our AI-powered digital assistant. Companies like Red Bull and Google Workspace gave first-hand insights on their experiences as we continue to drive the integration journey together with our customer and partner network.
If you want to embark on your own individual integration journey, here are key materials to start with:
- The updated SAP Integration Strategy Paper summarizes the latest 2023 integration highlights and gives an outlook of what you can expect in 2024.
- Our openSAP training on “Integration for the Intelligent Sustainable Enterprise” has already been taken by 7000 learners and if you want to learn how you and your company can also benefit from a seamlessly integrated business application portfolio, there’s still the chance to register!
Dr. Philipp Herzig Steffen Pietsch Phil Loewen Matthias Allgaier Anette Asmus Jimmy W. Steffen Eghardt Jose Maria Sabadell Christoph Thommes Carsten Ziegler Michael Maier Konstantin Heine Carsten Puschke Dr. Ralf Ackermann Sara Helal Fabian Lehmann Neetin Datar Paul Maxwell Carlos Portillo Arne Ludwig Frank Bareis Mike Uhl Bharath Ajendla Martin Herrmann
Quick and smooth onboarding to SAP BTP with GenAI
Onboarding to SAP BTP and setting-up an SAP BTP landscape will become much easier in the future. The team did a tremendous job in simplifying the whole user experience by letting our generative AI-based assistant Joule carry out BTP setup tasks based on user requirements. It will be integrated into the SAP BTP cockpit and will help automate cumbersome tasks like onboarding users, creating SAP BTP subaccounts, and managing service subscriptions and entitlements. This way, users can interact with BTP anytime, anywhere, without having to leave the context of SAP solutions.
Check out the labs preview from SAP TechEd 2023 to see Joule in action.
SAP BTP Innobytes: Do you have 3 minutes?
In this fast-paced era, not everyone has the time to surf through various mediums to catch up on all the updates that revolve around SAP BTP. That’s exactly why we launched “Innobytes”- a crisp, fresh, and snackable overview of all the highlights for our SAP BTP enthusiasts. The team has been releasing short videos every month covering all the latest innovation highlights and new features that have been introduced across our entire portfolio - application development, automation, data, analytics, integration, and artificial intelligence.
To stay tuned and watch all episodes, check out this blog post.
Connecting applications in the cloud and on the ground
With more and more SAP customers moving to the cloud, the ability to integrate both on-premise and cloud-based applications and processes in a cost-effective way has never been more important. With the general availability of the “Edge Integration Cell” as the hybrid runtime for SAP Integration Suite, we have closed the last remaining gap to enable PI & PO on-premise customers to quickly move to SAP Integration Suite! Customers can now design their integration scenarios in the cloud one time, and then decide to run them anywhere they want. This containerized runtime option – the environment in which a program or application is executed – works in both customer-managed data centers and private clouds. That means customers with heterogeneous and distributed environments have greater flexibility and control over integrations and APIs while meeting strict enterprise architecture requirements.
Edge Integration Cell was announced at SAP TechEd.
To learn exactly how hybrid deployment works using Edge Integration Cell, check out SAP's user help.
Big kudos to Bhagat Nainani and team for making it happen!
Achim Kraiss Andreas Quenstedt Valeri Nikolov Finny Babu Oliver Deckert
SAP Build Code is a game-changer for SAP developers
It’s so great to see the overwhelmingly positive feedback by our customers and partners for the SAP Build Code launch at SAP TechEd 2023! Developers who are creating new applications or extensions for SAP solutions can now leverage SAP’s generative AI assistant Joule for rapid application development - to generate code, create data models, and test data for applications. Developing unit test scripts and testing applications for various scenarios is also easier with SAP Build Code’s new generative AI capabilities. SAP Build Code is the latest, powerful addition to the SAP Build product family, driven by Bhagat Nainani and his team. Yet another great example of cross-team collaboration where feature development goes hand in hand with foundational cloud qualities around security, reliability, and scalability our teams continue to drive.
Bhagat Nainani John "JG" Chirapurath Tim Back Sid Misra Mark Wright Bharat Sandhu Alon Sachar Fabian Lehmann Anette Asmus Rui Nogueira Jan Schaffner Joachim Jakob Joe Campbell
Introducing Garden Linux in SAP’s Ecosystem
Garden Linux has been out there for a while now! Known for its ironclad security and stability, it’s a Debian Linux derivative specifically designed for Kubernetes clusters (not limited to Gardener). A huge shoutout to Malte Janduda Andre Russ Vincent Riesop Nikolas Kraetzschmar Stefan Catargiu Thomas Buchner Florian Wilhelm Dirk Marwinski and Christian Cwienk for introducing Garden Linux in SAP’s ecosystem.
Garden Linux includes all the essential packages and a Linux Kernel optimized to run Kubernetes nodes in a secure fashion. Garden Linux is ideal for running on cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud. It also runs inside our SAP data centers. Today, Garden Linux serves as the foundation for thousands of Gardener Kubernetes clusters run by SAP. Garden Linux is open source and can be found on GitHub.
Happy 10th anniversary, SAP Integration Solution Advisory
It's just exciting to see how the SAP Integration Advisory Methodology has evolved since we first published it 10 years ago. If you are looking for guidance on how to increase the integration maturity level in your organization, this methodology is a must-read resource for you! It provides a systematic and guided approach to the design and execution of your enterprise integration strategy, including information on integration patterns, reference architectures, and additional support for best practices for cloud and hybrid landscapes.
By now, the community has 3000 members (customers, partners, SAP) and it's great to see how customers like toom Baumarkt drive their transformation with a standardized approach to integration!
SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology is now also part of the SAP BTP Guidance Framework, which provides a central access point for decision guides, methodologies, and best practices. Make sure you check it out!
Steffen Pietsch Matthias Allgaier Katrin von Ahsen Konstantin Heine
SAP Secure Login Service for SAP GUI
Already more than 100 customers have subscribed to the SAP Secure Login Service for SAP GUI that we released in May this year. The solution is based on the SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Cloud Identity services, offering certificate-based single sign-on and communication encryption for SAP GUI. It is the go-to solution for customers of the on-premise product SAP Single Sign-On.
The new solution comes with capabilities such as enhanced user experience, better integration with existing authentication infrastructure, and a really simple setup. The included SAP Cloud Identity capabilities support an easy connection to your Corporate Identity provider or configure multi-factor authentication.
For details, check out our SAP Community page.
Michael Friedrich Christian Cohrs Martina K. Jonas Z.
SAP BTP, Kyma Runtime to be completely modular soon
This is a major milestone in BTP’s roadmap, as this framework provides our users with more flexibility and control over their managed Kyma clusters. The new modularization framework was enabled for all new SAP BTP, Kyma runtime clusters on all landscapes this July, and migration of the existing clusters is in full swing! For more information, check out this blog post.
We have spruced up the framework by introducing Keda (for container autoscaling) and Transparent Proxy, and by migrating the Serverless, BTP Operator, NATS, Telemetry, Eventing, Application Connector, and API Gateway components. Migration of Istio and Connectivity Proxy components is in the works too. We’re looking forward to wrapping up the project by early next year, reducing the minimum cluster size, and enabling further cost savings for our valued customers.
Exciting holiday time powered by GenAI!
SAP BTP is revolutionizing business operations with SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Build Code, and SAP BTP Cockpit…and all this powered by Generative AI! It’s been impressive and inspiring how our teams developed groundbreaking GenAI use cases for our portfolio with a remarkable dedication and cross-organizational teamwork.
To name a few: The Just Ask feature in SAP Analytics Cloud offers an effortless, natural language interface for gaining insights and accessing trusted company data. The latest generative AI capabilities in SAP Build and SAP Build Code enhance development efficiency and automation. Further advancements in SAP BTP Cockpit simplify administrative complexities, like reducing set-up time and offering up-to-date recommendations for customer-specific scenarios. And our newest DevOps case further simplifies the SAP platform experience.
Thanks to all teams & individuals involved! Jochen Schneider Joerg Doerflinger Kishore Kumar Vivekanandan Simone Di Somma Matthias Kraemer Ulrich Hoffmann Tim Back Tsvetan Gaydev Rhishikesh Thakur Dr. Felix von Reischach Matthias Heinrich Kalin Milanov
Catena-X: Empowering the transformation of the automotive industry
Excited to see how SAP is a trusted technology partner of one of the most exciting developments in the automotive industry - Catena-X: An open, secure and interoperable data ecosystem for the automotive industry designed to create data chains that will enhance the value chains.
SAP Industry Network for Automotive is SAP’s comprehensive Catena-X solution offering that integrates seamlessly with existing SAP systems to provide end-to-end visibility and control over the automotive supply chain with use cases enabling companies to optimize their operations, reduce costs, and achieve sustainability targets. In 2023, we opened the beta phase for Catena-X at HMI in April and celebrated the full go-live in October. Five SAP solutions have now been officially certified by Catena-X. Find out what's right for you: SAP Industry Network for Automotive | Supply Chain Planning
SAP Discovery Center has surpassed the 100,000 registered users mark!
From a humble start with 1k users in 2019, we've come a long way, and this achievement is a testament to the collective efforts of the entire SAP Discovery Center community. Our team has been on a mission to elevate the platform this year - here's some recent enhancements:
- Fiori Horizon – We've adopted Fiori Horizon for a seamless and delightful user experience.
- Reference Architectures – Curated and adaptable architecture templates tailored for building solutions on the SAP Business Technology Platform.
- Terraform Provider - Swift SAP BTP account setup for Discovery Center missions using our streamlined Terraform Provider.
- Centralized Use Case Repository – Cutting-edge authoring tool that streamlines the collection and maintenance of use cases in a unified, consistent source, directly fueling SAP Discovery Center. It also serves as the content discovery channel for internal reference.
A heartfelt shoutout to everyone who contributed to making Discovery Center the go-to adoption channel for SAP BTP and to enhancing the entire BTP experience for our customers.
Nis Boy Naeve Sachit Aggarwal Ingo Deck Marco Geldmacher Kerstin Dyck Katrin von Ahsen Avik Chakraborty Mohithraj B J Surya Venkatesan Elisabeth Pilarczyk David Drayton Konstantin Heine Rui Nogueira Jens Glander Nitin Kumar Akash Mishra Ajaroddin Havaldar
NHL® and SAP’s joint venture to reduce the League’s carbon footprint
The National Hockey League (NHL) has long been an advocate for environmental stewardship. As a part of their award-winning NHL Green program and to promote sustainable practices across its business, the League co-innovated with SAP to develop NHL Venue Metrics.
Venue Metrics derives powerful analytics from one of the most advanced databases, marking the League’s latest and extended use of the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). With our end-to-end cloud-based platform the League measures and analyzes the facility operations of NHL’s Clubs and arenas, including energy and water consumption, waste produced, recycling, along with their resultant carbon impacts. These insights help the NHL achieve their key objective - reducing its ecological impact wherever possible to ensure that the sport thrives for future generations! Here's more information.
Excited to see how throughout the SAP/NHL partnership, SAP BTP has been at the forefront of the League’s co-innovation efforts across multiple areas of their business.
Amy Schulz Erica Atkinson Daniel Beringer Danielle Venino Sally Lawler Kennedy Ashish Aitiwadekar Janardhan Bidharkota
SAP Private Link Service on AWS is GA now!
SAP Private Link Service on AWS is now generally available. With SAP Private Link Service in place, users can now connect SAP solutions like BTP to both customer-owned and SAP-owned hyperscaler accounts without exposing public endpoints or transferring data over the public Internet.
Congratulations team for making that happen from being a beta version in November 2022 to GA in September 2023! Sachin Pattan Gowrisankar Marichetty Josua Geiger Joshua Vecsei Stefan Lay Elina Zheleva Philipp Becker Ivelin Petkov
Check out this blog for more information: https://blogs.sap.com/2023/09/07/sap-private-link-service-on-aws-is-now-generally-available-ga/.
Empowering Youth and Enriching Culture: KulturPass DE Unleashes Substantial Benefits in Germany
In June 2023, SAP introduced the KulturPass app together with a cultural marketplace. A German government initiative to support culture gave everyone turning 18 in 2023 a 200€ budget to spend on fun things like concerts, cinemas, and museums, and even books, records, musical instruments, and more.
The mobile app garnered widespread acclaim, achieving an excellent store rating of 4.5 on Google Play Store and 4.2 on Apple's App Store. With over 725,000 reservations made through the platform, it's clear that the app resonated with people. But the numbers also reflect the broad adoption of the entire program. This success showcases how government-led digitalization projects really can be swiftly and effectively implemented.
For more information refer to this page.
A heartfelt thanks to all who contributed, and let's stay curious about the potential trajectory of this pilot project as we head into 2024!
SAP BTP transparent proxy for unified and virtually transparent consumption
SAP BTP transparent proxy is here to connect your Kubernetes-based workloads to the Internet and on-premise systems with ease. Be it cloud or an on-premise system, SAP BTP transparent proxy enables unified and virtually transparent consumption. By “unified” we mean logically the same client code for all the target systems, irrespective of a change in the system’s physical location. By “virtually transparent” we mean that the technical connection configuration will be externally managed in the SAP Destination service. Changes in the external technical configurations (including credentials and certificates) will be dynamically applied by Transparent Proxy.
AND: SAP BTP transparent proxy became a Kyma module, so our users can choose to enable/disable transparent proxy based on their business requirements and let SAP take care of the whole lifecycle management.
Check out this blog as well to learn more: Connecting cloud apps to Internet and on-premises systems using SAP BTP Connectivity.
Stoyan Vellev Manol Valchev Iliyan Videnov Vladislav Atanasov Hristo Kirilov Kaloyan Nikov Dimitar Kostov
SAP BTP, Kyma Runtime has entered the zero-downtime era
On November 1st, 2023, SAP BTP, Kyma runtime successfully transitioned to zero downtime maintenance mode, officially removing weekly maintenance windows from the schedule.
Service availability is our primary KPI for measuring the efficiency of our SAP BTP platform. We are fully aware that unplanned downtimes may have impact on our customers' businesses. That’s exactly why we took a series of decisive actions this year to reach even higher availability for SAP BTP as compared to the previous year.
Our Kyma team spearheaded efforts to break up monolithic updates and replace components that lacked high availability (HA) capabilities. Simultaneously, our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team took charge of adjusting critical infrastructure configurations, migrating to a multiple availability zone setup, and re-engineering the delivery process to fully capitalize on the modularization effort.
To leverage these new capabilities, check out this blog post.
Ulrike Schullerus Joachim Jakob Ulf Fildebrandt Bathra Mani Djay Chaudhary Jessica Palin-Riot Magdalena Strek Tim Riffer Korbinian Stoemmer Benjamin Somhegyi Gabor Nagy Roman Protsko Hamdy Moussa Szabolcs Tál Hoang Hai Nguyen
Celebrating 25 Years of Excellence at SAP Labs India and Israel
A heartfelt congratulations to the SAP Labs Israel and SAP Labs India teams and Orna Kleinmann and Sindhu Gangadharan for reaching a remarkable milestone of both Labs’ 25th anniversary in 2023!
I had the opportunity to visit both SAP Labs India and Israel this year and I was inspired and amazed by the teams' great energy and commitment to delivering cutting-edge solutions. A sincere thank you to everyone who has contributed to the incredible journey over the years - a quarter-century of achievements, growth, and setting new benchmarks for the future!
Juergen Mueller Thomas Saueressig Gerhard Oswald Clas Neumann Jan Gilg Anja Schneider Christine Regitz Joachim Jakob Uma Maheswaran S Peeyush Chaurasia Noa Goldman (Shacham) Eliel Schurman Gabi Levy-Koifman Nir M Kol Ariel Bentolila David Kviti Yair Vidal
Today marks the end of this year's holiday season calendar featuring all things SAP Business Technology Platform. Reflecting on 2023, it’s a joy to revisit our major SAP BTP milestones, key events, but first and foremost the memorable moments with customers, partners, and teams across the globe. It’s been an amazing journey – thank you for your trust and incredible support this year.
Big thanks also to all our colleagues who have supported me with the content for this calendar.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you and the very best for 2024.
I have definitely booked marked and its a great resource going into 2024. Congratulations on a great year.
A perfect summary of the successful year 2023 has been, leading to the awesome year 2024 is going to be... ✌ You always inspire and lead the way, Michael Ameling!