Today’s marketplace is nothing short of unforgiving. The right products and services must be built and delivered when and where customers demand them. Even unique solutions need to be adopted faster than the competition. Yet with SAP’s Business Technology Platform, businesses can deliver it all – no matter how uncertain the future may be.

The volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that businesses face right now has the potential to yield surprising changes. This year alone, we saw oil drop to negative pricing levels – even as little as -$US37.63 per barrel. Meanwhile, traditionally stable supply chains have become so disrupted that a rebound can’t happen fast enough.

So many unprecedented shifts are happening all at once, challenging how most companies predict and stay ahead of every new situation and scenario. However, the solution to overcoming this lack of clarity is not a matter of capturing more data. It’s a question of leveraging a massive volume of real-time data and interpreting it to act on risks and opportunities with precision and confidence.

Insight-driven edge for an uncertain world

Dealing with constant change can make anyone feel unsettled – unless the user experience is seamless. From business models, processes, and cultures to applications and collaboration solution, every mechanism and digital tool must be supported by a reference architecture that brings together embedded analytics, system security, and identity and access management.

This approach streamlines and improves the user experience while maintaining the flexibility to evolve in the future with ease. To deliver the full promise of this digital strategy, companies need a stable business technology platform and a clear perspective on the technology and the use cases it supports.

The ability to build agility, drive innovation, and generate business value is always a good starting point. But SAP’s Business Technology Platform is designed to help businesses go even deeper in their transformation. They can gain an integrated ecosystem of data warehousing, analytics, database and data management, and application development and integration – either on premise or in the cloud.

Three adoption scenarios for a business technology platform

A business technology platform provides a range of intelligent technology that automates processes, discovers patterns, and matches them with relevant solutions, and includes machine learning–enabled data intelligence. Each of these capabilities can be applied to deliver on one of three adoption scenarios.

1. Data harmonization

SAP’s Business Technology Platform offers fast, in-memory processing, sustainable agile services to integrate data and extend applications, and fully embedded analytics and intelligent technologies. The ability to access, connect, and analyze business-critical operational data (such as transactions, costs, clicks, and sales) and experiential data (often based on customer feedback and survey results) provides a unique differentiator.

Offering near-limitless potential for improving business outcomes, the platform acts as a connected, integrated data landscape that unifies data management, analytics, artificial intelligence, the IoT, blockchain, and application development technologies.

2. Application extension

Side-by-side extension and integration of existing on-premise and cloud applications are critical for avoiding disruption across core business processes and delivering engaging, cloud-native applications to power agile innovation.

Also essential is the flexibility of an open platform that runs efficiently, remains compliant, and avoids vendor lock-in. SAP’s Business Technology Platform supports multiple deployment scenarios and seamless interoperability. This option supports an on-premise underlying infrastructure, in a private cloud, within a hybrid, or as part of a multi-cloud setup established with any major hyperscaler.

3. Continuous innovation

Combined with business semantics, content, and context, SAP’s Business Technology Platform provides a synergistic, business-focused approach to merging database and data management, application development and integration, analytics, and intelligent technologies. This scenario reduces the friction of using individual technologies to turn data into action and prevent unnecessary data movement within an organization’s landscape.

With SAP’s Business Technology Platform, our customers make confident decisions and act with integrity. They can easily connect their business processes and experiences for their customers, employees, and partners – all of whom inspire the urgency to innovate and compete effectively in their industries and markets.

Collaborative insight, business value, and inspired action

The agility to quickly turn data into business value is critical when navigating any disruption and economic uncertainty. Any time organizations can immediately collaborate and deliver outcomes together as one team is an opportunity to infuse a can-do spirit throughout the workplace culture, strengthen customer value, and gain stakeholder confidence.

With SAP’s Business Technology Platform, such an edge is made possible for SAP customers. They have the real-time insights and capabilities needed to steer around a murky landscape of constant change and uncertainty. But most importantly, the agility to adapt, adjust, and pivot their strategies and course of action presents an intelligent edge that could rival their competitors.

Listen to Anja’s Live SAP Community Call on the SAP Community YouTube channel, and explore the SAP Sapphire Now Converge Business Technology Platform channel and the Business Technology Platform customer success stories to learn more about how SAP customers are transforming their businesses SAP technologies.