Last Friday, I stumbled across an interesting tweet from SAP’s CTO, Juergen Mueller. Although SAP has been moving towards openness and multi-cloud support within its cloud platform (now known as SAP BTP) for quite some time now, there still seems to be a lot of confusion around just what this means for customers. So, it’s nice to see reminders like this pop up from time to time.

These reminders are particularly important for SAP shops that may have spent years working in almost complete isolation. For these kinds of shops, I suspect that the very thought of integrating SAP and Azure just feels wrong. Sort of a “if we need bots, then by God we’ll use the SAP Conversational AI Service” mentality, if you will.

However, if you take a closer look at what SAP has put together with their Business Technology Platform (BTP), you’ll see that the entire platform is designed to be open so that customers have choice. In this sense, it’s not “unSAP” to extend the reach of your SAP systems using Azure, AWS, or GCP — it’s just a new motion that may feel different.

In some ways, I think this almost boils down to an IaaS vs. PaaS discussion. For example, consider Project Embrace. For many customers, Project Embrace was just about forklifting SAP workloads (S/4 HANA-based or legacy) onto Azure IaaS. However, IaaS was really just the tip of the iceberg. With tools like the ABAP SDK for Azure, ABAP developers were provided with tools they could use to connect their SAP systems with some of the latest and greatest PaaS services available from Microsoft. Such services can be used to connect SAP in ways that we’ve never really seen before within businesses — and it doesn’t take deep knowledge of cloud technology to get there.

As technology evangelists, this is kind of a difficult story to tell because the possibilities are truly endless. To help put this concept into perspective, I put together the following sketch that re-imagines the old SAP NetWeaver refrigerator drawing using Microsoft Azure-based technologies. Although you could probably do similar things with AWS or GCP, the point here is that there’s a world out there where SAP developers could have access to much more powerful tools to build modern SAP solutions. With SAP BTP, ABAP can still be in the picture, but it’s truly “bring-your-own-language” (BYOL).

In the weeks to come, we’ll be shedding some more light on these concepts as we zoom in on some specific mashup scenarios. For now though, here are some great resources to get you up to speed with what’s going on with SAP and Azure:

• myNewsWrap — SAP and Microsoft Podcast by Christian Lechner
• SAP on Azure Podcast by Holger Bruchelt
• SAP on Microsoft Tech Community
• ABAP SDK for Azure
• Your SAP on Azure blog series by Bartosz Jarkowski
• SAP on Microsoft Azure book by SAP Press