Azure API Management vs. SAP Business Technology Platform

APIM is useful for the standard scenarios:

1) Securing your back-end APIs - If you have a legacy back-end web service that has a basic authentication scheme, you can add some additional security by placing APIM in front, and requiring subscription keys. Leverage your existing firewall to ensure only your APIM instance can communicate with your back-end API, and you've basically added a layer of protection.

2) Lift and shift - there are always going to be clients that don't want to update their clients to use a newer API; in some cases you can make a newer API look like an older one by implementing some complex policies in APIM. You can also do the opposite, making older APIs look new, such as making an XML back-end accept both JSON and XML.

3) Centralizing your APIs - if you've acquired another company and want to make their API set look as if it's a part of the larger whole, APIM is an easy way to provide a consistent front-end interface for developers.

Incentivized

If you want to use a well-designed SAP technology to shift into the cloud, you will be more than satisfied with the BTP services overall. There are some improvements for beginners to help them get a better overview of what to do and how to start with their account. My recommendation is to take a foundation training course from the SAP learning hub to prepare for the first steps.

Incentivized

• Easy commissioning of APIs.
• Great policies to control access.
• Easy mock services for testing.

Incentivized

• It is very easy to use.
• All the documentation around it is geared towards the enterprise use case, unlike some other hyperscalers' platforms.
• The SAP Business Technology Platform is very good because it's got the SAP customer and their business processes in mind. Probably my favorite thing about it is how easy it is to get up and running with a new use case and how well it natively connects to an SAP solution.

Incentivized

• Lack of robustness is a bit of an issue. Several other providers offer more options and capabilities, but then, they are lacking in interface ease.
• As with anything Azure, pricing is really hard to stay on top of. I always find that you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you get the bill. Having an excellent Azure Administrator can help resolve that.
• Integrating with app services outside of Azure can be a challenge, or at least much more challenging than just using Azure App Services.

Incentivized

• The Automation Integration service has some outdated workflows
• New services should be available as entitlements as soon as they are released for a particular region without having to buy them from SAP for zero dollars
• Any subaccount should be able to change the IAS tenant. Currently, if you set it up for a particular IAS, you cannot change to another tenant and are required to recreate the services in a new subaccount.

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

Okay, so the content that we have built on the platform is limited to specific testing on the iFlows within integration suite. The visualization layer is nice to use and helps with the design elements, however with developers that are more used to markup languages, it doesn't have the same CLI type feel when you want it. Perhaps the majority of users are that deep, but other platforms have a better CLI type developer experience.

Incentivized

Services are generally available

Incentivized

The biggest problem we ran into was communication between SAP Business Technology Platform and onsite resources. Unfortunately our SAP Business Technology Platform and Cloud systems are under different customer numbers. I constantly had to open tickets under each customer number because I was unsure of where the issue lied. And having to create a dummy ticket for our ECC systems to open the ECC connections for another ticket under the Cloud customer is a pain.

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

Having a full cloud native environment for devlopment of microservices and digitals solutions while having standardized access to our core data on SAP via cloud connector is one of the main benefits of using BTP over others hypervisors. BTP is the standard hyperscaler as soon as something relies on data from SAP systems in our company now

Incentivized

Azure APIM vs Amazon API Gateway:

1) Azure APIM was a complete package that included a developer portal.

2) We are very Microsoft centric - so the Microsoft product suite aligned very well with our business needs.

3) It was faster and easier to stand up Azure APIM for testing than it was for the Amazon API Gateway.

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

It's scalable

Incentivized

• We can always think of positive ROI impact on business
• It helps to easily facilitate the design, deployment, and maintenance of our APIs

• Infusing Generative AI capabilities easily into our solutions with existing talent with minimal learning curve, has been very impactful. We have been able resolve several challenges for our clients with AI capabilities, that we could not, previously.
• Integration Suite is quite extensive in capabilities for bringing together the IT landscape into a single ecosystem.

Incentivized