Strategic Platform Decisions: SAP BTP, Hyperscalers, and the Case for Coexistence
- Adam Hislop
- Jul 1
- 10 min read
Updated: Jul 8
In today's enterprise IT landscape, hybrid architecture isn't just a trend – it's the reality. Studies show that 80–89% of organisations now embrace multi-cloud strategies, with nearly 70–80% of those opting for a hybrid approach that blends public and private cloud resources. This architectural evolution reflects the complexity of modern operations and the need for agility, compliance, and control.
As SAP customers modernise their landscapes, one question frequently arises: Should we build on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), or leverage native services from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud?
It’s a valid dilemma. On the one hand, BTP offers native integration, SAP-aligned services, and business context. On the other, hyperscalers offer unmatched flexibility, scale, and breadth of tools. Neither is universally superior. Instead, the right choice can depend on architecture goals, organisational capabilities, and the context of each use case.
This article explores how to evaluate SAP BTP and hyperscaler-native services across key dimensions – including integration, innovation, cost, and governance. Our goal is to help IT leaders and architects make informed, context-aware decisions that align with their transformation strategy – not just platform loyalty.
SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is SAP’s strategic response to the evolving demands of enterprise cloud computing. Rather than being just another cloud platform, BTP is positioned as a business-centric technology layer designed specifically to unlock the value of SAP’s core applications. It supports the creation of extensions, the integration of diverse systems, the application of advanced analytics, and the deployment of intelligent technologies like AI and automation – all within a framework deeply aligned with SAP's data models, security constructs, and business context.
At the heart of BTP lies a suite of services that work together to support enterprise agility. The SAP Integration Suite, for example, allows businesses to connect SAP and non-SAP systems in a seamless manner, enabling process automation and real time data exchange. It supports comprehensive API management, centralised monitoring, and event-driven architectures. What sets it apart is its ability to offer low-code and no-code capabilities for faster enablement, alongside prebuilt integration content and templates that significantly reduce time-to-value.
Similarly, SAP’s Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) provides developers with a structured yet flexible framework for building enterprise-grade applications. CAP accelerates development while promoting best practices like domain-driven design and modular service architecture. It simplifies common tasks like user management and security, integrates easily with SAP HANA and Fiori, and enables scalable, cloud-native deployment patterns. CAP is particularly well-suited to teams building side-by-side extensions that need to evolve alongside core SAP applications.
On the front-end, SAP Launchpad plays a crucial role in consolidating access to applications and tools. It acts as a unified entry point where users can personalise their dashboards, access both SAP and third-party services, and engage with role-specific data and tasks. The Launchpad not only improves user experience but also drives productivity by reducing context-switching and training overheads.
In contrast, hyperscaler-native services such as AWS Lambda, Azure Logic Apps, and Google Cloud Functions offer a different value proposition. These platforms are general-purpose, open, and developer-first. Their breadth and maturity in areas like data lakes, advanced analytics, IoT, and machine learning are unmatched. Developers can work in a wide variety of languages, leverage global availability zones, and integrate easily with thousands of services. These platforms excel in flexibility and scalability, making them ideal for greenfield innovations, high-volume compute workloads, or public-facing digital services.
However, the choice between SAP BTP and hyperscaler-native services is rarely binary. They are not competing products in a strict sense – they are complementary layers within a modern hybrid architecture. BTP shines in SAP-centric use cases where context, security, and integration matter most. Hyperscalers provide unmatched freedom and innovation at the infrastructure and service layer. Successful enterprises are increasingly building architectures where both coexist harmoniously, orchestrated for purpose.
The decision between SAP BTP and hyperscaler-native platforms often comes down to practical considerations – not platform ideology, but the realities of integration, speed, skills, cost, governance, and innovation. Each of these factors can shift the balance in a different direction depending on the project, the team, and the strategic goals.
When working close to the SAP core, integration becomes one of the most immediate differentiators. SAP BTP has been engineered to connect seamlessly with systems like S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, and Ariba. It provides access to SAP business events, APIs, and Core Data Services out of the box. These features allow developers to hook into enterprise workflows quickly and safely, without needing to reinvent connectivity or worry about breaking compatibility during upgrades. Event Mesh, for example, enables real time responses to business changes, while the Integration Suite simplifies process automation across SAP and non-SAP landscapes. Achieving the same outcome on a hyperscaler typically means assembling and maintaining a more fragmented architecture – one that requires custom connectors or middleware layers to engage with the SAP backend.
That tight coupling with the SAP stack also gives BTP a distinct edge when it comes to delivery timelines. It allows teams to move faster for SAP-centric use cases, especially those requiring secure extensions to existing applications. Tools like SAP Build and Business Application Studio are designed with SAP semantics in mind, reducing the ramp-up time. Development frameworks such as the Cloud Application Programming Model guide teams toward best practices and accelerate testing and deployment. Meanwhile, SAP Launchpad ensures that users can access new functionality through a unified, role-based experience that mirrors the rest of the SAP environment.
Hyperscalers, by contrast, offer agility of a different kind. When the use case is greenfield or not SAP-dependent, hyperscaler-native development often proves faster and more flexible. These platforms are designed to support a broad range of languages, frameworks, and runtime environments. Teams working on external-facing portals, customer engagement apps, or AI-driven services benefit from rich developer tooling and mature CI/CD pipelines. Here, the speed advantage comes not from SAP alignment, but from the freedom to innovate with minimal constraints.
This leads to a natural consideration around skills. BTP is ideal for teams already immersed in SAP tools and paradigms. Developers familiar with Fiori, CDS, and CAP will be productive quickly, especially when the solution stays within SAP’s domain. For broader development communities, however, hyperscalers tend to be more accessible. Their ecosystems are built on open standards, and their services are widely documented, making it easier to hire and onboard talent.
Cost management is another critical dimension, particularly as cloud consumption scales across organisations. SAP BTP operates on a metered, service-based model. While this provides flexibility, many organisations find it challenging to forecast costs accurately or manage them in real time. FinOps practices on BTP are still evolving, and cost transparency may vary between services. By contrast, hyperscalers have invested heavily in FinOps tooling. Real-time billing dashboards, granular usage analytics, and integrated budgeting tools allow teams to track and control cloud spend with precision. They also support automated guardrails and policy enforcement – essential for managing cost in large, multi-team environments.
Governance and security considerations tend to mirror the integration landscape. BTP benefits from alignment with SAP's identity, authorisation, and compliance models, making it easier to extend enterprise applications without introducing governance gaps. Identity federation, role management, and audit logging are all built to work across SAP services. Hyperscalers offer robust security models too, but they require more active configuration and cross-platform expertise. For enterprises managing sensitive data across multiple clouds, this difference can have a significant operational impact.
Where hyperscalers truly shine is in the breadth of innovation they make available. Their service catalogues are massive and growing – from pretrained machine learning models to data lakes, serverless compute, IoT platforms, and quantum simulation environments. This makes them ideally suited to projects that demand experimentation or advanced analytics. If a business wants to build a global recommendation engine, a dynamic pricing model, or an AI-powered chatbot, hyperscaler-native tools may offer a faster, richer path to production.
Still, innovation within the SAP context is not out of reach. SAP’s AI Core and AI Launchpad are building momentum, offering access to intelligent services grounded in business data and processes. This approach may not match hyperscalers in breadth, but it brings discipline and structure to innovation efforts – especially in use cases where context and trust are just as important as experimentation.
Ultimately, the decision is rarely black and white. A company building an S/4HANA extension for supplier management – one that must validate against SAP master data and initiate purchase requisitions – will naturally lean on BTP. The alignment, security, and lifecycle compatibility make it the efficient choice. That same organisation might also be developing a mobile app for field technicians that uses image recognition to assess equipment damage. This scenario, with its reliance on edge compute and AI, is better served by hyperscaler-native services.
As architectures become more distributed and composable, the question is no longer which platform is better – but which platform is better for a specific job. Making the right call means evaluating each workload on its merits, its dependencies, and the value it’s expected to deliver.
Across industries, from manufacturing and logistics to energy and consumer goods, we continue to observe recurring patterns in how organisations structure their use of SAP BTP alongside hyperscaler platforms. These aren’t abstract blueprints – they’re pragmatic responses to the realities of architecture modernisation, cloud strategy, and organisational capability.
In environments where SAP is central to business operations, many enterprises are gravitating toward a model where BTP becomes the default platform for SAP-related development. This is particularly true for companies undertaking major ERP transformation programs, or consolidating their integration architecture. In these cases, BTP Integration Suite often becomes the go-to tool for managing connectivity with SAP applications. It offers the structure, governance, and native compatibility needed to ensure core systems remain clean and stable. In parallel, these same organisations frequently adopt a second, hyperscaler-native integration layer – often based on Azure, AWS, or a COTS integration solution deployed on those platforms – to handle non-SAP interfaces or support broader enterprise integration goals. This dual-stack model allows teams to optimise for each domain without compromising control or cohesion.
Elsewhere, companies with strong cloud-native development cultures – particularly those that already maintain agile delivery pipelines on platforms like AWS or Azure – are beginning to explore how BTP can complement their existing strategies. While hyperscalers remain the primary environment for innovation, there is growing interest in the accelerators BTP provides for SAP-specific use cases. Identity management, authorisation, mobile enablement with offline support, and access to SAP events and APIs all present compelling reasons to fold BTP into the development toolkit. These teams aren’t replacing their existing cloud capabilities; they’re augmenting them – selectively adopting BTP services where they offer strategic advantages in terms of time-to-market or governance alignment.
Increasingly, the most forward-looking organisations are those adopting hybrid patterns. In these setups, transactional logic and sensitive business rules remain anchored in SAP, while customer-facing interfaces, mobile applications, or real time analytics are built on hyperscaler infrastructure. Integration is achieved through APIs or events – often mediated by SAP’s Event Mesh – allowing each component to scale independently while maintaining loose coupling and clear domain boundaries. These patterns are particularly common in customer service portals, field service apps, and digital sales platforms, where speed, scale, and user experience matter as much as SAP alignment.
In all of these cases, the underlying thread is architectural clarity. When organisations clearly define where SAP BTP delivers unique value, and where hyperscaler platforms provide broader flexibility, they can build ecosystems that are not only more capable – but more sustainable. Rather than defaulting to one platform for everything, the focus shifts to choosing the right foundation for each solution. That’s where we see the most success: not in standardisation for its own sake, but in purposeful orchestration of diverse tools and platforms, each selected for what it does best.
To support more structured decision-making, it’s helpful to step back and view the platform choices through a broader, comparative lens. While individual project needs will always shape the final call, certain patterns emerge when evaluating technical and operational factors side by side. The following framework outlines where each platform tends to excel – not to declare a winner, but to clarify alignment based on architecture goals, user needs, and organisational strengths.
Factor | Favours SAP BTP | Favours Cloud Native |
|---|---|---|
SAP centric integration |  |
|
Rapid SAP extension | | |
Developer agility | | |
Access to AI/ML/IoT | | |
Skills availability | | |
Business event-driven UX | | |
Standalone innovation | | |
Built-in SAP security/identity model | | |
Pre-built SAP connectors and API's |  | |
Flexible infrastructure control |  | |
Global service availability | | |
Data residency / compliance control | | |
Enterprise FinOps tooling | | |
DevOps / CI-CD pipeline maturity | | |
Mobile + offline app support | | |
Cost predictability | | |
Open-source ecosystem alignment | |
By mapping these factors clearly, teams can better understand how SAP BTP and hyperscaler services complement one another, and where the trade-offs are most likely to surface. This perspective can be especially valuable for enterprise architects who need to balance short-term delivery with long-term platform strategy.
Choosing between SAP BTP and hyperscaler-native services isn’t about declaring one platform inherently superior to the other. It’s about understanding the nature of the problem at hand and choosing the right tool the tools best suited to solve it. In many cases, the most effective architecture will be one that blends the strengths of both worlds: the SAP context-awareness and integration simplicity of BTP, with the breadth, flexibility, and innovation edge of the hyperscaler ecosystems.
SAP has worked closely with major hyperscalers, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, to develop a comprehensive library of reference architecture models. These models act as trusted blueprints for organisations aiming to extend or integrate their SAP systems using hybrid or cloud-native approaches. They offer prescriptive guidance for designing secure, scalable and compliant environments that combine the robustness of SAP BTP with the flexibility and innovation of hyperscaler platforms.
The architectures cover scenarios like executing machine learning workloads on hyperscaler AI services, designing event-driven integrations between SAP and cloud environments, building centralised data landscapes with SAP Datasphere, and automating processes across multiple systems using SAP Build Process Automation. Each reference model includes architectural diagrams, design guidance and implementation steps—making them highly practical for architects and developers.
You can explore the full catalogue of SAP and hyperscaler reference architectures here:
For IT leaders and architects, the real challenge lies in striking the right balance between time-to-value, maintainability, extensibility, and cost. That balance will vary not only between organisations, but from one project to the next. What matters is that each decision is grounded in context, shaped by a clear understanding of constraints, and guided by strategic intent.
Done thoughtfully, these platforms don’t compete – they complement. Together, they form the foundation of a modern, resilient, and scalable digital ecosystem. At Beta Digital, we’ve learned the magic happens when the platforms coexist together.
