SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is the unified, business-centric, open data and development platform for the entire SAP ecosystem. This statement means a lot so let me explain it in a simple term
- Development friendly- The platform provides ease of development for developers makes it an efficient place for developers and helps them in increasing efficiency as well as gives them a charm.
- Seamless Integration- It can talk with any other technology using its strong integration capability.
- The most important Value for Data- Nothing can be more important for a Business than data. It will provide a next-gen experience with data using its analytics, data lake, in memory powerful calculations.
High-Level BTP Basics and Set Up
BTP first carves out a private IP CIDR range from the network space. The BTP operation team deploys a set of virtual machines certified to HANA in that range.
The first layer is Platform Core, which uses Gardener. Gardener is SAP’s Kubernetes management tool and the main fundamental for BTP workload
Some other runtimes are also deployed in the platform core. One of them is Cloud Foundry (which is now used instead of Neo), others are Kyma, ABAP, etc.
BTP also has other sets of Kernel Services that are required for building SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise version. This concept is the same as the Linux kernel. Just for the sake of high-level understanding, Kernel is the main layer between OS and hardware. It helps in the management of memory, space, identity, audit log, etc.
Once the platform core is set up different technology units deploy their services that use one or more of these runtimes and kernel services. The whole portfolio of BTP includes Analytics, DBMS, Integration, and Extension suite.
BTP- Accounts and Directory
Global Accounts – It’s the realization of the contract of customers made with SAP used to mange the entitlements, quotas, members, subaccounts and directories.
Directories – allows the customer to organize and manage their subaccounts according to their technical and business needs.
Subaccounts – enable the customers to structure a global account according to their organization’s and project’s requirements concerning members, authorizations, and entitlements.
Entitlements are the right of customers to provision and consume the resources, as per their plan which for example can be PAYG or Fixed Contracts etc.
Directories can contain directories and subaccount. Subaccounts of one or more can be created directly under a global account. As we can understand this is more from the angle of security & authorizations.
BTP- Authorization
Global Account Administrator – A user is created at the global account successful contract establishment. The user (Global Account Administrator) from the customer side is given the required authorizations by SAP to manage entitlement and create directories and subaccounts.
The administrator can also create more than one administrator to share the rights and privileges at the Global Account Level. The administrator creates a subaccount administrator.
The subaccount administrator can create both business users/developers and assign required roles and authorization at the subaccount level
SAP Joule- Basics and Architecture
Before we start with Joule let’s start with the basics and foundation behind it.
Machine Learning :Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions
Example: A human baby is trained to learn and understand different relations in the family. Similarly, iPhone facial recognition is made to understand to it which one is the face of that particular iPhone owner.
LLMS: A large language model (LLM) is a type of machine learning model designed for natural language processing tasks such as language generation. LLMs are language models with many parameters and are trained with self-supervised learning on a vast amount of text.
Example: When we type to search for anything in Google it recommends some text in prediction.
Document Grounding: “Grounding” is a process that combines generative Large Language Models (LLMs) with advanced information retrieval to improve the quality and accuracy of responses, without the time, complexity, and expense of training or fine-tuning an LLM with company-specific data. Grounding uses a customer’s knowledge sources (e.g. travel policy, enablement content, service manuals, FAQs, etc.) to supplement an LLM’s internal representation of information, which can help models be more accurate and reliable.
LLMs & Joule
By Integrating the power of LLMs and SAP-rich business context, SAP has launched JOULE. Joule helps users to easily navigate SAP systems, execute transactions, find information, and get analytical insights, making employees 80% more efficient.
- Relevant content for our users → ensuring Joule understands a user’s context. This includes roles and permissions. But also, which SAP products the user is using.
- Reliable results → using LLMs means that responses are grounded on SAP knowledge and the business reality of the respective customer and end user.
- Joule is responsible → strict prohibition that any of our customer’s data is not used for training purposes or any other usage for any 3rd part
SAP Joule currently has the following interaction pattern.
- Transactional Interaction: Example who is my manager?
- Informational Interaction: What is my Leave policy in the organization?
- Analytical Interactions: How many associates have completed their goal setting?
- Navigational Interaction: Please take me to my address page
Joule Integration with SuccessFactors
When we log in to SuccessFactors (SF) we can see the SAP Joule icon on the SF screen ( basically a plug-in in SF). We launch Joule from SF interface. Joule ( Chatbot) will launch from the SF. The Joule instance sits in SAP BTP. It is hosted in BTP subaccount.
SAP Build Work Zone is also created. This is very important as we do a user synchronization from SAP success factors to Build Work Zone using the Identity Provisioning service.
Cloud identity services are used for authentication. So that when we launch Jould it is authenticated using IAS tenant.
The following are pre-requisite for establishing the connection between
SAP SF and Joule
1. SAP BTP Global Account.
2. Right Entitlement for Joule
3. Cloud Identity Service Admin
4. SuccessFactors Admin
5. All these user personas needs to be available
Run Joule
If the installation goes all good with all user personas and correct authorization then the Joule icon will be visible in the SAP SF Screen. Please note the Joule permission must be added to the SF profile of the user. This is taken care of when we run the Booster on BTP side, it creates the joule permission in SAP SF.
