For over 50 years, SAP has provided its customers business critical software. Over the past five years, SAP has been steadily steering customers toward SaaS and cloud—particularly SAP S/4HANA Cloud. But this evolution goes far beyond infrastructure. It’s about innovation, it’s about agility, and it’s about modernizing the entire ERP experience. At the center of this transformation is one foundational concept: the clean core.
Why a Clean Core Matters
For decades, ERP systems have been heavily customized. Developers wrote directly into the core to meet unique business requirements. It worked—until it didn’t.
As systems grew more complex, those customizations became liabilities. Each one added technical debt, creating challenges like:
- Costly upgrades – Every release required custom code revalidation, often delaying rollouts.
- Long testing cycles – Even minor changes triggered extensive regression testing.
- Innovation bottlenecks – Adopting new SAP capabilities meant rewriting or removing custom code.
- Unpredictable outcomes – Updates could cause ripple effects across the system, impacting stability.
A clean core flips this model. Instead of customizing the SAP codebase directly, businesses build modular extensions using SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). This decouples innovation from the core system—keeping the foundation stable, facilitating easier upgrade cycles while also allowing the same flexibility and extensibility customers expect. This more modern approach to software architecture is not just a best practice; it’s essential for thriving in a cloud-first world.
SAP BTP: The Innovation Layer
SAP BTP is the driving force behind the clean core strategy. It acts as a flexible innovation layer—providing a comprehensive UX strategy and providing microservices to extend SAP apps, integrate SAP and non-SAP systems, and support event-driven architectures.
Rather than coding custom ABAP in the ERP, teams now develop on-stack and side-by-side extensions that integrate seamlessly without compromising future upgrades. This modular approach dramatically reduces risk while accelerating delivery.
BTP isn’t just for developers—it’s a strategic foundation for speed, stability, and future readiness.
Innovation at Speed
SAP is investing in innovation at an unprecedented pace. In the last 10 years, SAP’s annual R&D spend has increased from around $3 billion to over $7 billion.
That investment is delivering rapid improvements across AI, user experience, and business functionality. But here’s the catch: none of it matters if your ERP is stuck on older releases, buried under legacy code and rigid dependencies.
A clean core ensures you can adopt the latest innovations quickly—without re-platforming or untangling outdated customizations. It turns your ERP from a barrier into a launchpad.
SAP Build: Now Fully Included with SAP Cloud ERP Private Package
SAP just made it easier to maintain a cleaner core. With its latest update, all capabilities of SAP Build is now included in the standard bill of materials (BOM) for S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition—and it comes with embedded entitlements that deliver value from day one.
SAP Build is your toolkit for building modern, on-stack and side-by-side applications and workflows without impacting the core. It includes:
- Development Capability – A hybrid low-code/pro-code platform supporting everything from quick apps to full-stack enterprise solutions.
- Workflow & Automation – Tools to digitize antiqued processes and manual tasks, automate workflows, and improve efficiency—no custom code required.
- Unified UX Layer – A centralized experience to access apps, analytics, workflows, and more—all in one place.
Joule: AI-Powered Acceleration
Embedded directly in SAP Build is Joule, SAP’s generative AI assistant. Joule makes every part of the development and automation process smarter:
- Accelerated builds – Describe what you need in plain language—Joule helps create it.
- Optimized workflows – Joule analyzes data and recommends automation opportunities.
- Guided innovation – It identifies gaps, suggests improvements, and helps teams iterate faster.
But the potential of Build and Joule go even further. With Build, Joule can be extended to gain additional capabilities.
This partnership between the solutions creates real opportunity for accelerated innovation. With these solutions together Build isn’t just a development toolkit, it’s an intelligent co-pilot for business transformation.
The Bottom Line
SAP’s clean core initiative is about more than modernization—it’s a strategic goal to support innovation, reduce risk, and future-proof your business.
With SAP BTP as your innovation platform and SAP Build (now fully included with SAP S/4HANA Cloud) as your toolset—enhanced by embedded AI via Joule—you’re equipped to build fast, stay agile, and innovate with confidence.
Clean core is no longer just an ideal. It’s a competitive advantage.
