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

SAP Business Technology Platform offers to run the cloud application without worries about availability and accessibility. This is helping us to enable the services that are really suited for us. For example, We have Cloud Identity Services that offer the capability to manage identity directory and also Identity provisioning functionality. Both functionalities helped us to manage the SSO and also enabled the auto-provisioning.

Incentivized

• Amount of templates
• Common features like authentication, localization, etc
• Support and community

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

• Initial learning curve - There is a lot of training and help material available, but one of the hardest things to grasp (and also to explain) are all of the reasons why the 'ABP way' is better. Many times, it seems to be more complicated or more difficult than the 'simple' way of doing things. Over time, as you expand on functionality and add more and more layers of complexity, you realize WHY they build the software the way they do, and it goes from appearing complex to appearing elegant.
• Support - Some support techs are excellent, but others seem to be missing to just supply ANY answer to a question (which is often something along the lines of 'read the help').

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

Overall, I feel it is build toward as an SAP centric platform. Which is very proper direction for SAP as it is their competitive advantage. However, as a customer, I like to see the cost of the services to come down with the advance of underlay hardware capabilities. Licensing model can be streamlined for easier budgeting and consumption.

Incentivized

I give it 9/10 because its customer support team is responsive and knowledgeable, providing clear guidance on complex issues. We contacted them several times; I want to give one example. When we had a problem with third-party integration, we reached out to them about the issue, and they provided a tailored solution for this.

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 Business Technology Platform is easily connectable using standard solutions to the onpremise backend SAP systems. Services can be linked with each other and with SAP systems in a managed and secure way, while with the other products getting the data, access and networking done is cumbersome. Also we can make sure to have all cloud environments in the same region using the multi cloud approach wich reduces latency problems.

Incentivized

• Time saving
• Costs saving

• Spending time to develop the application idea and visualize first before jumping to SAP Business Technology Platform and initiate development
• Take the time to test and validate architecture and data flows for the potential application or process to be developed on SAP Business Technology Platform
• Conduct regular assessment of usability, effectiveness of process turnover

Incentivized