ABP vs. SAP Business Technology Platform

If you are building a simple web application and want to bypass all of the basic building blocks (authentication & authorization, multi-tenant, etc, etc.), then ABP Commercial will allow you to do this very quickly with their tooling. It is also an excellent tool if you are building a large complicated SAAS product, as long as you are willing to invest the time required to understand the 'why' behind their architectural decisions and follow their methods throughout your development.

Incentivized

However, there are many scenarios where SAP BTP is well suited; I will just describe one. As we deal with large volumes of data and often receive the data from diverse sources, the platform enables us to integrate the data from diverse sources such as CRM, ERP, and supply chain management systems.

Incentivized

• Documentation
• Premium theme
• Basic modules

• Authentication options - In the past, we needed to really leverage our own solutions for MFA and other security measures, but now, out-of-the-box these options are really good and readily available.
• Ease of use - the interface has been adjusted to be really easy on the eyes but also simpler, less convoluted, and really well thought out.
• Modernized SAP experience - compared to the old stuff, SAP is really modernizing all of the experiences. The new house style is rejuvenated, and the company is really becoming more likable compared to 10 years ago!
• SAP Discovery and Missions are a real treat to see what the upcoming costs are!

Incentivized

• More modules are always welcomed

Incentivized

• The almost mandatory use of HANA services to run CAP applications. It would be best to provide extensive support for other databases.
• The subspace landing page/cockpit is not so user friendly. Provides a lot of information and usually is hard to find where things are.
• Downtimes should be shorter.

Incentivized

Seamless integration with external system and dashboard to monitor the data flow and analysis are very essential for the business. The way the product is designed and modelled lead to minimum business disruptions. Adopting to the new and modern technology was easy. Keeping the central system as clean and adopting project bases development are advantages.

Incentivized

The development and deployment of applications require too many services. So, sometimes it is challenging as there are multiple services. The monitoring and logging mechanisms are not very apparent. This makes it difficult to choose the services required during design. Applications that use AI for eg., extraction or chatbots, are great use cases to build on BTP. Also custom applications that require a ERP integration but are not enhancements, are good use cases for development on BTP.

Incentivized

We are in direct contact with responsible persons at SAP. When we have a question regarding a service or functionality we will directly get help to move on with SAP Business Technology Platform Developments. That is important because SAP Business Technology Platform is heavily involved in our IT Strategy.

Incentivized

Training material in Developers Community or from Learning hub are really good... also most of the time we route through Discovery center... so materials provided by SAP is really good.

Incentivized

1. Sometimes the licensing doesn’t make sense, e.g., Difficult to understand the license for ABAP cloud runtime. 2. When SAP Business Technology Platform workflow cost is very high but process automation which offers more features has less cost.

Incentivized

SAP Concur allows our staff to book, reimburse and remain spend audit compliant. Our Concur system takes feed from Workday and interacts with Credit card vendor. It also makes posting to Accounting and does clearing. SAP Business Technology Platform helped in establishing connection with all these different tools in real time. It helps in getting paid to the card service provider through our Bank through interface, which is built on SAP Business Technology Platform.

Incentivized

• We have a small team, and ABP Commercial has allowed us to build a SAAS application that is feature-rich in much less time than if we built everything from scratch.
• ABP Commercial continues to provide benefits with every update. Keeping current on new versions of dependencies (such as .NET) requires a fraction of the work on our end since ABP Commercial updates the base framework and we can leverage that work. This was a HUGE benefit when IdentityServer4 changed from Open Source to a very expensive commercial license.

Incentivized

• Positive: ease to deploy applications and integrations
• Negative: PI/PO was much cheaper in our current contract. The message based pricing is understandable but difficult to quantity over time towards management
• Positive: no firewalls you need to worry about to get integrations or APIs triggered but you need to be concious about this and take your own precautions
• Negative: with integration suite SAP Business Technology Platform integration cell is announced meaning more responsibility to the customer to decide where to run what in which without certainty the current runtime will still be supported in the long run.

Incentivized