Why Clients Say No to BTP – and How to Change Their Mind

“I don’t want a BTP implementation!” — customers.

Too often, innovation becomes a hot potato—something everyone wants to pass around but no one wants to hold.

Sure, some organizations proudly announce full migration to BTP. But the truth is, most clients are cautious—worried about cost, complexity, or leaving the comfort of their on-premise world.

Let’s explore how to turn that “No” into:

“Why didn’t we do this sooner?”

🧩 End Customers Straight into S/4HANA

Problem: When Familiarity Becomes the Biggest Risk

Imagine a client who needs a customer-facing portal where end users (B2B or B2C) can check the status of their service requests in S/4HANA.

The traditional, on-premise decision looks like this:

Create external user accounts directly in S/4HANA
Assign roles like for internal users
Manage everything in the same environment

At first glance, it seems fine. But this approach brings three critical risks:

1. Security Risk

External users, even with restricted roles, operate inside the same system as internal employees.
This creates both a real and perceived risk of data leakage or unauthorized access.

2. Performance Issues

Suddenly, customers are running transactions on the same system that handles your critical business operations.
Mass requests, job spikes, and concurrent sessions all strain your S/4HANA performance.

3. Increased Maintenance Load

Every password reset or access issue lands on your Security/Basis team’s desk.
This operational burden steals time from core maintenance and innovation tasks.

🔧 The “SAP Plumber” Architecture: When Customers Wait in the Dark

Here’s how things often get worse in practice:

The customer submits a request in a legacy system.
→ Success: 200 - Request Created
The legacy system stores it in a staging database.
Periodically, it pushes requests to S/4HANA through APIs.

And then… the chaos begins:

S/4HANA rejects some requests due to missing data or failed business rules.
The customer receives no feedback—just silence.
The issue lands with “SAP Plumbers,” who manually check logs, retry jobs, and fix records.

The result?
Frustrated users, wasted effort, and endless firefighting.

💡 The Solution: Client Portal on SAP BTP

Isolation. Visibility. Scalability.
That’s the BTP advantage in three words.

Client portals are one of the most canonical use cases for SAP BTP.
Here’s why.

1. Isolation and Security

Deploy a new portal app (CAP in Node.js or Fiori/UI5) on SAP BTP.
External users log in only through BTP.
All user accounts, sessions, and traffic stay completely separate from S/4HANA.

This ensures your ERP remains secure and unaffected by public user interactions.

2. Full Request Status Visibility

The BTP app can integrate directly with your legacy systems:

Consume existing APIs, or
Connect directly to the legacy database (via driver).

From the moment a request is created, customers can view its current and complete status inside the BTP portal.

If needed, use OData APIs from S/4HANA for controlled, read-only access (e.g., invoice number, assigned agent).
APIs act as a gateway—not an open door.

3. Unleashing Data Potential

By using SAP HANA Cloud as your BTP database, you instantly unlock analytics capabilities:

Integrate with SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), or Business Data Cloud (BDC).
Build dashboards and KPIs on customer activity, performance, and satisfaction.

What was once a simple portal becomes a data-driven customer experience platform.

🧠 Turning “No” into “I Need This”

When clients say “No to BTP,” they often mean:

“I don’t want extra cost.”
“I don’t want complexity.”
“I don’t understand the value.”

Our answer is:

“BTP isn’t an end goal—it’s a tool that eliminates critical business and security risks.”

Whenever data isolation, external access, or scalability come into play,
SAP BTP is not just a good option—it’s the only sensible one.