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Last week, I presented a few sessions on SAP BTP at the SAPinsider 2022 conference in Las Vegas. In addition to questions the product itself, there were many questions raised about pricing. With that in mind, I thought I’d put together a blog post which addresses some common pricing questions we fielded during the conference.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty details of specific BTP pricing options, I think it’s helpful to spend a moment reviewing what specifically SAP BTP is and how it’s positioned in the SAP+cloud landscape. As you can see in Figure 1 below, SAP BTP is positioned as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. This has a few important implications:
- Although other SAP applications (e.g., S/4 HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, etc.) may run within the same cloud data centers, they do NOT run on SAP BTP itself. SAP BTP may be in the picture (e.g., the SAP Integration Suite might be used to facilitate A2A integration) but, at the end of the day, BTP is a PaaS solution and therefore has nothing to do with hosting/infrastructure.
- The primary focus of SAP BTP is to provide developers with a platform for building extensions to SAP business applications (e.g., bolt-on apps, interfaces, workflows, etc.).
- In some cases, your SAP sales rep may effectively “throw in” BTP licenses as part of a licensing deal for cloud products like SAP SuccessFactors. In these cases, it’s important to understand that these licenses are usually limited in scope (e.g., only integration) and don’t provide carte blanche access to any and all BTP services.
The important take-away from all this is that SAP BTP provides a suite of services which are separate SKUs from anything going on with SAP S/4 HANA (either in the cloud or on-premises) or SaaS solutions like SuccessFactors or Fieldglass.
Another common set of questions we fielded were related to pricing models. These days, SAP offers its customers three different BTP pricing models:
- Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA): This option is primarily targeted at customers who have plans to build a pretty large BTP footprint. The starting price point is ~$10K a year on a 1–3 year contract term. Under this model, developers/administrators can gain access to various BTP cloud services using cloud credits that are allocated to your tenant account by SAP. You can find more information about the terms here.
- Subscription: This option allows customers to lock into pricing for specific cloud services for 1–3 years. Unlike the CPEA option, this option makes it possible to purchase services à la carte.
- Pay-as-you-Go: As the name suggests, this option is a consumption-based pricing option which allows you to only pay for the resources you actually use. The complete list of services offered is available here (see Figure 2 below). You can click on the calculator icon to access a pricing estimator tool to get pricing details (see Figure 3).
Although SAP sales generally recommends the CPEA/contract route for its customers, we always encourage our customers to explore all their options when it comes to BTP licensing.
This is especially true the early running whenever you’re just dipping a toe in the BTP waters. For example, we had a customer last year that was looking at using BTP to deploy a single Fiori app to the cloud. After going through a sizing exercise with them, we found that consumption-based pricing would save them over 500% off (that’s 5 with two zeroes) of what they had been originally quoted on a CPEA plan. Obviously, the CPEA plan offered way more in terms of service credits, but the customer didn’t have plans to use those services any time soon, so the pay-as-you-go option was perfect for them.
This is by far the most difficult question to answer when it comes to BTP because it really does depend on what you want to get out of it. If you look at the service catalog published on the SAP Discovery Center, you’ll find that there are a LOT of services to choose from. Although they’re grouped by capability, it can still be difficult at times to figure out what all you need.
At a high level, the service catalog is split into two areas: the SAP Extension Suite and the SAP Integration Suite. While you can mix-and-match services within the Extension Suite, the Integration Suite is much more restrictive.
In the case of the SAP Integration Suite, you’re effectively purchasing a product: SAP Cloud Integration (formerly known as CPI). SAP Cloud Integration is an eIPaaS (Enterprise Integration Platform-as-a-Service) which serves as the cloud-based analog to SAP’s on-premises SAP Process Orchestration (also known as SAP Process Integration) middleware solution. With SAP Cloud Integration, the purchasing unit is by tenant account, so there’s no way to really purchase part of the integration suite. At the time of this writing, the starting price is about $5,570 per month for a single tenant account.
Within the SAP Extension Suite, you can purchase services à la carte. For example, if you wanted to build a self-service portal experience for your customers, you could leverage services such as the Cloud Portal Service and Conversational AI service to build the solution. Regardless of the scenario, it’s important to understand the details of the service plan(s) to make sure that you have all of the necessary resources since there are limitations/dependencies to account for. We are always happy to sharpen our pencils to help customers work through these exercises should you have questions or need assistance.
Another important thing to consider when it comes to BTP pricing is that you have options to shop around. These days, BTP mostly runs on top of popular cloud hyperscaler platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In these scenarios, you have the option to mix-and-match SAP-provided services on BTP with services provided by the host hyperscaler platform.
To put this concept into perspective, consider the diagram shown in Figure 4. In this scenario, we have a custom app running in the BTP Cloud Foundry environment and we want to store data in a PostgreSQL database. Here, if we’re running BTP on Azure, then we could leverage Microsoft’s Azure Database for PostgreSQL service to spin up a database instance over there.
In practice, there are two ways to do this:
- You purchase these hyperscaler services directly from SAP. In this scenario, SAP serves as the middleman; you pay SAP for the services and then SAP turns around and purchases the compute resources on your behalf from the hyperscaler.
- You purchase the services directly from the hyperscaler and then use cloud-native techniques (e.g., 12-factor apps) to dynamically bind to these services from within BTP runtime environments.
In the latter case, you can generally save some money by going directly to the source.
Increased Budgeting Flexibility
Although SAP offers consumption-based pricing with most of their BTP services, the models are generally not very granular. For example, your options might be limited to standard vs. premium. However, with hyperscalers, you usually have the option to only pay for what you use in terms of compute resources. This option can come in handy in scenarios where you have small footprints or requirements for dynamic horizontal scaling.
To put this concept into perspective, we recently had a customer that was exploring the use of the SAP Integration Suite to host a couple of interfaces between an on-premises SAP S/4 HANA system and a 3rd-party SaaS solution. As noted earlier, the starting price for an SAP Cloud Integration tenant account is about $5K/month. However, when we priced out the compute resources using Azure Integration Services, the monthly cost came out to just over $36/month.
To be clear, this is not a commentary on whether Azure Integration Services is better than the SAP Integration Suite. If this customer had been looking to re-platform a larger number of interfaces or make a strategic call on the ideal EiPaaS solution for the enterprise, then the conversation would have gone very differently. However, for a one-off requirement to implement a couple of one-off interfaces, having access to consumption-based pricing was huge from a project budgeting perspective.
Pushing the Envelope
As you consider your multi-cloud strategy, another thing to bear in mind is that you’re not just limited to the services SAP provides and/or re-sells with BTP. For example, if you prefer to use some of Microsoft’s specialized IoT services to the ones provided as part of BTP (e.g., their IoT edge product line), this doesn’t mean that you have to abandon the use of BTP altogether in favor of Microsoft Azure. Instead, we might collect IoT data in Azure and then stream it through the SAP Event Mesh into downstream workflow processes, etc.
The point is that SAP’s open approach with BTP has unlocked access to a much broader set of cloud services. These services can be mixed-and-matched with BTP services to push the envelope in terms of innovation.
I hope this post provided some answers to common questions you may have with SAP BTP. If you have further questions, please feel free to book some time with one of our SAP solution architects. Whether you have questions on licensing options, strategy, or just want to understand more about what SAP BTP has to offer, we’d be happy to sit down with you and build out a tailored roadmap to put you on the path to success.
