Power Apps vs. SAP Business Technology Platform

PowerApps is well suited for "quick-wins" and fast prototypes of business solutions. It also is beneficial for situations where business partners and developers work together - it allows the business folks to provide a "quick-and-dirty" prototype which is then fleshed-out by developers that are trained experts on the platform. The interactive and easy to understand representation of the solution allows business partners to "see" the solution and add, remove, or correct aspects of it themselves. It provides a common view and understanding of the actual solution across business units and tech teams. PowerApps, being a low-code\no-code platform is not well suited for business processes that require many complex computations or large amounts of custom code - such as solutions that are better architected as Web Site or "full-blown" desktop solutions. There are solutions that are just not easy or quick to accomplish in a low-code\no-code platform. Enterprise Architects should know the difference, however business partners often try to create a solution and only when stuck because it becomes too complex do they engage a tech team for assistance - at which point there are sunk-costs involved and hinderences to re-platforming the solution

If your organization has a lot of SAP talent, and you want to bring together SAP and non-SAP skills together to build solutions, BTP is ideal for you. If you have SAP solutions in your IT landscape, using partner add-ons built on BTP makes it simple to rollout. If you currently don't have SAP talent in your organization, and you are using other cloud platforms already, then BTP ma not be your choice.

Incentivized

• Power Apps has formats that are pre-built that don't require any coding which makes it easier to achieve your vision. This does become a challenge if your App needs don't fit into that format.
• We deal with a ton of data so the fact that you can connect to any data source in addition to their pre-stablished data connections makes the process a breeze.
• The online learning resources and tutorials are helpful as well for those who are tech savvy.

Incentivized

• 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 complicated to understand in comparison with Nintex Forms.
• Complicated to find errors.
• Using PowerApps for SharePoint Forms is a bit complicated by setting up the start and load scenario with a lot of JavaScript.
• Load values, change them by code, and save them back could be easier. Actually quite complicated to handle a lot of variables.

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

PowerApps is a great solution and I have spent the last year familiarizing myself with the platform and building custom applications to complete a whole range of tasks such as asset management, custom invoice generation, and item restriction tracking. We as a company have barely begun to scratch the surface of what can be achieved with PowerApps.

Incentivized

I improved my development by joining all the applications in one place, which has guaranteed me a more organized job. With all the information in one place, I don't fear losing valuable information, and I can interact with my colleagues from anywhere, doing a job well and improving my quality of productivity.

Incentivized

The community forums are extremely responsive to questions asked, there is a good body of online documentation and many community posts to draw from. Although the platform has changed, which means some of the posts are out of date and the solutions provided aren't relevant. Of relevance, I read over 400 articles plus documentation to get this first app built in SharePoint, move it to SQL and make it work exactly the way it should.

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

Much cheaper, much more customizable, and easier to use. There is not much of a learning curve and the licensing cost is much cheaper. PowerApps does one thing very well, whereas other platforms are mediocre. There is much more customization possible for your in-house workflows that you can build yourself vs using NetSuite engineers to build it for you.

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 has given us a focal point for development. We now have the possibility of connecting to mobile and the default SharePoint online interface isn't always easy to manipulate. PowerApps has given us an opportunity to improve our user experience.
• An improved user experience has given us a better shot at compliance. When users don't fight the environment, they don't gravitate towards workarounds or non-compliance.
• As lists and libraries change, the platform scales pretty well.
• Having users with the capability to create their own forms and tools has dialed back the app dev need (there is a balance though) and distributed power to the process architects and people who actually need the solutions in the first place—much more efficient model of service delivery: self-service.

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