SAP Extends Business Technology Platform with Free Tiers, Citizen Dev Tools

SAP is making its Business Technology Platform (BTP) more accessible to partners by releasing low-code/no-code tools and adding free tiers. The BTP enhancements, revealed Tuesday at SAP’s TechEd event for developers, aims to accelerate migrations of applications to the cloud.

The new tools include  SAP AppGyver, a user-friendly, no-code development platform, and SAP Business Application Studio, a low-code programming environment. Both are designed to let partners or customers with no or limited developer resources build applications or extend existing ones. Also, SAP released a preview of a no-code robotic process automation (RPA) tool.

“We have been doubling down into our investment with low-code and no-code tools for citizen developers,” Juergen Mueller, SAP’s CTO said during the opening TechEd keynote. (Shown above delivering the keynote.) “With this unified, low-code, no-code offering, we bridge the gap between professional and non-technical developers.”

Specifically, Mueller said Business Application Studio’s support for low-code development lets professional developers support citizen developers. Individual developers have access to these tools through SAP’s free tier model.

Free Tier for Individual Developers

A year ago, SAP introduced the free tier to BTP, its platform-as-a-service designed for modern, cloud-based apps. The company is now expanding the free tier to individual developers, plus support for SAP HANA cloud and the SAP Integration Suite. Those wanting to move the free solutions into production can transition to Pay-as-You-Go SAP BTP and Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreements.

SAP’s Steffen Pietsch

Among those championing the free tier offering was Steffen Pietsch, who was then CTO of the SAP User Group in Germany. Now head of BTP product management at SAP, Pietsch discussed the free tier with Mueller during the keynote.

“Developers can now build their proof of concepts on SAP BTP without any commitment,” Pietsch said. “Then if they then decide to move their applications [into production], they can simply do so by changing from a free to productive service plan without rebuilding the entire application into different accounts. The free tier means that it is much easier to gain experience and to start to innovate with SAP BTP because there is no initial financial commitment for an increasing number of use cases.”

The new tools and expanded free tier extend the Rise with SAP offering launched earlier this year, consisting of packaged solutions that run on the company’s S/4 HANA cloud.

“With S4 HANA at the center, it provides the transition path to the cloud,” Mueller said. “Our customer and partner base understands that SAP S/4 HANA is the goal for ERP. And regarding extensions and integrations, they will happen with SAP BTP to keep a clean core.”