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SAP BTP as an offering is relatively new, it consists of solutions that have been around for years,and portions of the platform’s architecture go back quite a ways.

For example, the application development and integration pillar of SAP BTP (more on this pillar below) can trace its lineage back to SAP HANA Cloud Platform in the early 2010s.

SAP BTP was first introduced in 2021 when SAP decided to package multiple services and products into one platform that businesses could use to make business decisions.

Their reasoning was, that there are so many different parts to an intelligent enterprise, it made sense for them all to be offered by one vendor, rather than having to integrate disparate systems into a central core.

As part of this announcement, the SAP Cloud Platform brand was sunset and SAP Cloud Platform’s functionality was rolled into SAP BTP.

Throughout 2021 and into 2022, SAP bolstered SAP BTP with different acquisitions. For example, in July 2022, SAP announced it was purchasing Ask Data to improve its AI-related capabilities in SAP BTP, particularly regarding natural language searches.

The latest features of SAP BTP include the release of SAP Build Code and SAP Build Apps (formerly SAP AppGyver) for low-code/no-code development, enhancements to AI capabilities, and the introduction of SAP Graph.

The SAP BTP offering is relatively new, it consists of solutions that have been around for years, and some of the BTP components go back quite a way.

The Application Development and Integration pillar of SAP BTP can trace its lineage back to SAP NetWeaver Cloud (Neo) – SAP’s first Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

There are two environments of SAP BTP, which have a common set of services—but also services that are unique to each of the two environments.

1) Neo environment

The Neo environment focused on cloud capabilities available from SAP‘s own data centres and allows users to connect to SAP ERP solutions. Development languages available in the Neo runtime are limited to Java, HTML5, and SAP HANA XS.

2) Cloud Foundry environment.

This allows users to utilise any data centre, not just SAP’s centres, and allows more extensibility options for developers and hyperscale vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Developers can bring their own programming language to this environment and multiple runtimes exist, including one for ABAP and Kyma.

Using Neo, developers can create HTML5, Java and SAP HANA extended application services (SAP HANA XS).

It doesn’t allow a “bring your own language” offering as Cloud Foundry does and it can only be hosted on SAP infrastructure and not others.

The types of programming language one can use in Neo are also limited.

Hence when compared, Cloud Foundry is a better runtime environment for developers to build their applications.

SAP is also phasing out the Neo environment, so we can safely say the future is Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform that is governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

It is not proprietary to SAP; anyone can download it and use it for free in their own infrastructure.

SAP BTP also provides Cloud Foundry as a service, and to use it will cost you money because it is hosted on SAP BTP, and you need to pay for the service provided by SAP.

Cloud Foundry is offered as a service by so many other cloud providers as well, like Amazon Web Services, MS Azure, GCP, IBM, etc.Cloud Foundry supports different types of programming languages like Java, Node.js, Go, PHP, Python, .NET Core and Static file.

It can be hosted on its own internal infrastructure or on cloud infrastructure offered by companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, etc.