SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is the company's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, that brings together intelligent enterprise applications with database and data management, analytics, integration and extension capabilities into one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments, including hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications.
BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.
We find SAP Business Technology Platform well suite for applications in enterprises that are moving toward more of a composable architecture. The speed at which you can develop, change, and modify (and then grow the footprint) is solid capability. However, in some cases where an integration does not need the flexibility of composability, a more simple, basic, and less frequently changed experience can benefit hybrid or on-prem-first customers.
It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow.
Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors.
If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites.
Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day.
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
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.
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.
I gave this rating because we are using SAP Business Technology Platform as a platform for cloud applications. It is helping us shaping our digital product capacity in many ways. We are different applications like BAS to design the custom application. CPI to enable the integration between applications including non SAP applications. IAG is helping to enable governance for cloud applications.
BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.
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.
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.
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
BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are Microsoft SQL Server. Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.
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.
A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware.
A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business.
A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts.
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.
