IBM Cloud Foundry vs. SAP Business Technology Platform

As it is an open-source platform as a service, it is very easy to operate, scale, and deploy regardless of what programming language and framework it's written in. However, it could be improved in terms of scalability. There should be proper documentation for easier and clearer understanding to make the process smooth.

Incentivized

SAP Business Technology Platform is highly suitable for AI agentic development, particularly when workflows require dynamic orchestration, modular service integration, and real-time decisioning. However, it may be less effective in environments where backend services are fully encapsulated and do not expose interfaces or events that SAP Business Technology Platform can interact with—limiting its ability to orchestrate or extend those services meaningfully.

Incentivized

• Simplicity - the command line tool provided can get you up and running within minutes.
• Resourceful - IBM Cloud Foundry is built on top of the open source Cloud Foundry technology, so any resources you find online about Cloud Foundry generally can be applied.
• Feature rich - provides all the necessary features for a cloud based platform, such as auto-scaling, 0 downtime deployment.

Incentivized

• Services are operated by SAP with outstanding support, always giving a helping hand even if it is custom code or solution provided on the platform
• Services are easily connectable via standard approach to our backend SAP systems in SAP Rise/HEC
• Secure access using identities from our existing identity management helping us to safeguard data security from within SAP systems up to custom frontend applications

Incentivized

• Need: VISUALIZATION CAPABILITIES! Particularly with the Conversation Service.
• Need: Annotation capabilities for dialog nodes in Conversation Service.
• Need: Search/querying capabilities in Conversation Service
• Need: Clearer documentation of the S2T service. I had to use a third party website for an understanding of how to use this.

Incentivized

• For IAG, if there are multiple roles it can be overwhelming from an UX standpoint.
• Controlling and identifying shadow user creation is not as intuitive.
• Unlocking admin rights to an environment seems very easy if having elevated permissions, this seems like something that should have more controls rather than being able to unlock admin rights yourself.

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

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

CF is what we initially went with to establish a development pipeline and start our cloud journey, now we are expanding this and although we are now pulling in many other tools and functions around CF, it is not being replaced. It stands out as having a key place working ‘with’ git, Kubernetes, IBM cloud etc, not against or segregated from it.

Incentivized

Initially, SAP Business Technology Platform works hand in hand with S/4 HANA and the SAP product suite, but also can go and extra mile and integrate with other non-SAP products and services at hand. It's capable enough to understand the ERP use cases component and develop intelligent applications to satisfy the users.

Incentivized

• IBM Bluemix is mainly a foundation enabler at this stage, although our business plan does look promising.
• The low cost of development on Bluemix for a start-up like us is so helpful......we had no spare cash for this project besides what we could save or borrow at first, and that wasn't much. We are still trying to attract venture capital to cover the main Cordova Coding effort plus the launch "Cash Burn".
• Features like push notifications, mobile-back end, and world-beating security help us to sell our SaaS products/services.
• The pure (usually!) functionality of IBM products and services is very rewarding to work with.They are so insightful and thoughtful, to say naught of clever!

Incentivized

• Still using traditional devops instead of using build. Very high cost in development.
• Still using Node.js instead of REST ABAP. Additional cost of resources. Migration of current CAP to RAP will be costly and do not have a business case yet. Continue with multi-language is costly.
• Integration suite is power but the migration from PIPO to IS has been more challenging than being advertised.

Incentivized