The SAP Business Technology Platform is the technological foundation for all SAP applications and the Intelligent Enterprise. Customers can flexibly build, integrate and extend business applications with development agility and speed – thus SAP BTP serves as business-centric and open data and development platform for the entire SAP ecosystem. Since many partners offer the integration and extension of business applications via the SAP BTP for their customers, it was only logical that SAP’s Certification for Outsourcing Partners program has extended their certification offering with a certification for SAP BTP operations.
What has been the motivation for introducing this new certification for SAP BTP operations?
The SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is an important part of the overall SAP strategy. Not only customers have repeatedly asked SAP’s Product Management for reliable partners who have experience with SAP BTP, but also SAP partners themselves have raised their demand to underline their capabilities in SAP BTP’s operations with a corresponding certification service.
What exactly does this certification cover and what requirements do partners have to meet?
The certification initially covers the partner’s service portfolio as well as the experience and individual certifications of the partner’s employees in the area of SAP BTP. Additionally, the different phases of the service offered on SAP BTP, such as “Set Up and Plan”, “Develop and Build”, “Go Live and Monitor”, as well as “Improve and Retire” are covered. Another focus is on SAP Integration Suite, Data-To-Value scenarios and SAP Extension Suite and will be covered in detail in the certification audits. These topics are complemented by general topics such as Project Management, Quality Management, Knowledge Management, and IT Service Management, which are also part of other certification services of SAP’s Certification for Outsourcing Partner program.
To pass this certification successfully, the partner should at least fulfill the following requirements:
- Partners offer at least one integration extension or new business application on SAP BTP
- Partner’s SAP BTP services are used by minimum one productive SAP BTP customer in the country to be certified
- A Service Desk including an Incident Management process should be implemented
A pilot phase for the new certification was carried out at three selected partners – how did that go and what was the feedback from these partners?
The auditor went through the usual certification process with the pilot partners. This showed that the service addresses the right topics and that the auditors selected the right questions.
Overall, the feedback from partners was very good, and there is already interest in having other countries/regions certified as well.
How is the interest in this certification or are there already concrete inquiries about it?
Even before the certification was launched, it has been introduced to partners in mostly individual conversation, e.g. during audits executed, or in the course of the re-certification alignments. In almost all cases there was a high interest to either add this certification immediately to the existing certification scope, or at least to have it planned as a scope extension for the next re-certification.
An overview of all certified partners can be found in the SAP Outsourcing Operations Partner Guide (www.sap.com/opc).
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