Get Started with SAP BTP Enterprise Accounts

SAP BTP provides two different types of global accounts: “Enterprise” and “Trial.” The type you choose determines pricing, conditions of use, resources, available services, and hosts.

SAP BTP Enterprise accounts are usually associated with SAP customer or partner contracts and contain their purchased entitlements to platform resources and services. However, it’s also possible to create an enterprise account for personal exploration.

If you do not have an Enterprise Account and wish to explore or buy one, you may refer to a pay-as-you-go license and use Free Tier Service Plans. You can learn more about the “Free Tier model” later in this mission.

You can also order a SAP BTP Pay-As-You-Go license in SAP Store

For developers and single users, who want a jump start, we recommend starting on the SAP Business Technology Platform Trial page.

For Trial Accounts follow the tutorial Get a Free Account on SAP BTP Trial in the SAP Developer Center.

For more information, visit SAP BTP Trial Home

SAP is conducting monthly webinars to ensure all new customers are aware of how BTP fits into the overall strategy of driving customers towards becoming intelligent sustainable enterprises and the general BTP functionalities.

The SAP BTP Onboarding Resource Center page provides access to live webinars, recorded & deep-dive sessions, and a blog series that can help you in your SAP BTP onboarding journey. 

Furthermore, you can also schedule a 1:1 discussion with the SAP BTP Onboarding team or reach them at SAP_BTP_Onboarding@sap.com to ensure a smooth onboarding to Business Technology Platform.

Note: The monthly webinars and 1:1 onboarding sessions are free of charge. 

SAP Business Technology Platform Use Cases are real-life use cases, that show how SAP BTP can help meet your specific business needs.
You can explore the SAP BTP use cases on the SAP home page.

SAP BTP capabilities are delivered as services. Before you utilize a service, you need to be familiar with the service plans available to select the right one for your scenario.
You can get more information about the existing service plans of a service in the SAP Discovery Center.

Further information about SAP BTP

• Visit the SAP Business Technology Platform Home Page

• SAP BTP on SAP Help Portal:

  • SAP Help - SAP BTP home page link
  • SAP Help - SAP BTP Getting Started link
  • SAP Help - Best Practices for SAP BTP link

• SAP BTP on SAP Community:

  • SAP BTP Blogs all BTP blogs
  • SAP BTP Questions
  • SAP Developers Tutorial Navigator

BTP offers two different commercial models for BTP enterprise accounts Consumption and Subscription:

• Consumption-based commercial model in the flavors
• BTPEA (SAP BTP Enterprise Agreement) – new license introduced as of April 2024
• Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) - for existing CPEA Accounts
• Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG)

• Subscription-based commercial model.

For more information on pricing, see SAP BTP Pricing Options

Some services are Always Free, which indicates that the service offers a service plan that is free of additional charges, as it is already included in your overall SAP BTP contract.

TThe consumption-based models Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) and SAP BTP Enterprise Agreement (BTPEA) / Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) offer, in addition, Free Tier Service Plans for specific services.

Free Tier Service Plans allow you to trial certain SAP services within your enterprise account free of charge to see if they can meet your needs.

For an overview of Always Free & Free Tier services, visit SAP Discovery Center Services.

Consumption-based commercial model

With the consumption-based model, your organization purchases an entitlement to all current and future SAP BTP services that are eligible for this model. Throughout the duration of your contract, you have complete flexibility to turn services on and off and to switch between services as your business requires.

The consumption-based commercial model is available in the following flavors:

• BTPEA (SAP BTP Enterprise Agreement) – new license introduced as of April 2024
• CPEA (Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement) - for existing CPEA Accounts
• and Pay-As-You-Go for SAP BTP

SAP BTP Enterprise Agreement (BTPEA)

BTPEA is an evolution of the existing Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) commercial model.

BTP services can be used when demand arises and be retired when not needed anymore.

• Your organization makes a prepaid investment in cloud credits for the contract duration and makes an annual commitment to consume SAP BTP services.
• This model is suitable for customers with well-established and planned use cases who want the flexibility of turning services on and off and switching between services without the commitment of being tied to a single service throughout the duration of the contract.
• You receive a monthly balance statement that provides information about the usage consumption of each service and the corresponding costs. The total monthly cost is deducted from your cloud credits balance.
• This model has a minimum investment entry, and volume-based discounts are available.
• You are billed annually in advance. Any overages are billed in arrears at the list price.
• You can top up your cloud credits at any time to prevent overages.
• You get the new BTP services

BTPEA global accounts do not support SAP BTP, NEO environment.

Please look at the Discovery Center services for the complete list of supported services.

Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) - (only existing accounts after April 15th, 2024)

Note: The service scope of CPEA will not be extended. All new services will be available with BTPEA.

Your organization makes a prepaid investment in cloud credits for the contract duration with an annual commitment to consume SAP BTP services.

If you wish to benefit from SAP’s latest innovations and shift to a BTPEA license, please reach out to your SAP Account Executive for more information.

Also, please refer to the common FAQ on the new pricing model towards the bottom.

Pay-As-You-Go for SAP BTP (PAYG)

With PAYG you can start using cloud services in your production environment with no upfront cost, no minimum usage requirements, and no financial commitments.
Contract auto-renews every three months with monthly billing.
PAYG is based on the services of the Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA).

If you want to try out an SAP pay-as-you-go account with free tier service plans, you can sign up at SAP Store or follow the tutorial Set Up an SAP BTP Account for Tutorials.

Subscription-based commercial model

Your organization subscribes only to the services that you plan to use. You can then use these services at a fixed cost, irrespective of consumption.

The entitled cloud services can be used up to the limit of your purchased subscription.
To use more, you can increase your license volume.
You can optimize your cost by knowing exactly what you need, getting discounts, and benefiting from budget security throughout the contract period.

You can add new services or modify your contract by contacting your SAP sales representative or visiting the SAP Store.

Trial

You can also get a free single-user SAP BTP trial license in case you have no access to BTP.
This gives you access to our community and all the technical resources, tutorials, or blogs you need.
Visit the SAP Developer Center or the BTP Trial cockpit.

This is one of the most important topics and we request your attention while activating/using your free tier services.

Free tier services are only available on consumption licenses, i.e., PAYG or CPEA. As a customer, if you have opted for any of the license models you are eligible to use the free tier and the options show up in your BTP global account.

Free tier services allow you to try out a growing selection of SAP BTP services without being charged up to specified limits for each service.
For more information about the free tier service plans and their capacity limits, see Discovery Center Free Tier Services.

Important!

Note: We have seen situations where customers activate resources in an Enterprise Account unplanned which may end up consuming all the CPEA credits or unexpected bills in case of PAYG.

Note: Not all services are available with a free service plan and not all free service plans are available in all regions and with all providers.

Be careful while activating services in all scenarios. Do not activate any services in Enterprise Accounts if you strictly want to avoid costs for the services and you are not sure if the service and its service plan are free. In this scenario, consider using a BTP Trial Account first to become familiar with BTP service configuration.

Get started with free tier service options:

If you are the global administrator or getting your services activated, it is important to understand the entitlements, with the PAYG and CPEA license model your company has access to all the 90+ BTP services without restrictions.
This unlimited access can help you to spin up all the services as required for your projects.

Let us take a look at service assignments from a Global Account.
Every service listed in the BTP has its charges, which are known as “ service plan” and “quota,” to understand the number of units and their usage.
Taking an example, the image below details some of the free services and a few that are not included as free tiers.

With the Integration Suite, we see that the free tier is applicable and we can also see that the assigned quota is 1 which is already consumed by one subaccount.

If the user tries to assign the free tier services to more than one subaccount, a clear message is displayed indicating that the free service is already in use, as shown below.

If you activate the integration suite services with enterprise_agreement or messages, you will be charged based on the pricing details listed in the Discovery Center.

Common FAQ on BTPEA and CPEA

1. Can I have BTPEA and CPEA in one single Global Account?

   Ans: No, however, you may have two Global Accounts for BTPEA and CPEA if you wish.

2. Do All services, in CPEA exist in BTPEA?

   Ans: No, BTPEA will not support Neo services and deprecated services. Please refer to the Discovery Center – services section for the support list of services in BTPEA.

3. Does BTPEA include free tier services?

   Ans: Yes, the free tier service will continue to be available with the BTPEA license model for most of the services.

4. What if you choose to stay on CPEA? What are the implications?

   Ans: As a customer, you may choose to remain on CPEA (renewal and upsell will be possible) and buy more credits.
   However, all new innovations or offerings will be added to the BTPEA as the list of available services under CPEA has been frozen.
   Hence, we recommend moving to BTPEA if there are no geographical limitations.

5. Will the CPEA voucher in RISE/GROW be replaced with a BTPEA voucher?

   Ans: **At this time, the CPEA voucher will continue as is until a new BTPEA voucher is introduced shortly.

6. I decided to stay back on CPEA, but I do not see the BTP Services in the Catalog for the CPEA license model. How do I understand/estimate my CPEA pricing and consumption?

   Ans: The Discovery Center – Pricing Estimator tool can help you with the CPEA services pricing and plan your estimations. (Home / Control Center / My Estimates or link)

Accounts are structured according to global accounts, subaccounts, and directories.

A global (enterprise) account is the realization of a contract you made with SAP.

Global accounts are region- and environment-independent.

After a successful first login, you will land on your global account home page.

• A global account is either of the account type enterprise or trial (a limited single-user account).

• A global account is used to manage global account members (typically for managing the global account), entitlements and regional subaccounts.

• A global account can contain one or more subaccounts in which you run applications and services.

For further information, see SAP Help - Account Model.

Entitlements of your Global Account

When you purchase an enterprise account, you’re entitled to use a specific set of resources, such as the amount of memory that can be allocated to your applications.

The amount of resources you may consume is defined in the Service Plans of a BTP service. For example, SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry Runtime offers in the commercial model CPEA the service plan “Free” with the limited resource of 4 GB memory to consume. The service plan “Standard” let you choose the amount of memory you want to consume.

Entitlements are purchased and managed at the global account level, from where they’re distributed to subaccounts, which consume them.

Some BTP services, like Cloud Foundry Runtime, need an explicit “Quota” for a subaccount, which means a certain amount of the available entitlement is distributed to a specific subaccount.
When you remove quotas from a subaccount, they become available again at the global account level and can be assigned to other subaccounts.

A global account can contain one or more subaccounts in which you deploy applications, use services, and manage your subscriptions. Subaccounts in a global account are independent from each other.

The entitlements and quotas purchased for a global account must be assigned to the individual subaccounts.

Each subaccount is associated with one region and one provider running in that region. Each region represents a geographical location (for example, Europe, US East) where applications, data, or services are hosted.

Regions are provided either by SAP or by our Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) partners Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. The third-party region providers operate the infrastructure layer of the regions, whereas SAP operates the platform layer and Cloud Foundry.

For each subaccount, you select exactly one region (that is one data center) and one provider.

For an overview of all available regions, see Discovery Center.

Click the small world icon in the filter bar.

As a result, you will see an overview map for Regions and Providers.

Environments constitute the actual platform-as-a-service offering of SAP BTP that allows for the development and administration of business applications.

Infrastructure Providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP or Alibaba Cloud provides the Multi-Cloud Foundation which comprises three different environments:

• Cloud Foundry environment, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology for many BTP services
• Kyma environment, a Kubernetes runtime to build cloud-native Kubernetes-based extensions
• ABAP environment

SAP data center provides the NEO Environment with a limited set of services.

To actually use an environment in a subaccount, you need to enable it by creating an instance of that environment, which will be explained later in the mission.

Note: Not all Services, Applications, or Environments are available in all Regions and on all Providers. Different Providers, Environments, and Regions may have a different set of available services.

Available SAP BTP services are listed in the Discovery Center Service Catalog.

If you select a service you can find under the tab Pricing information about

• the available commercial models for each service
• Service Plans for the commercial model and if e.g. free tier service plans are available or not
• Regions (data center locations) and providers where you can provision them and
• the Metric how the consumption of the service is measured

Important to note, that you also have an option to add all the services to the estimator tool to get a glimpse of the overall charges of the services that you may use for your projects.
The charges/prices are applicable for every service that is activated in your global account/subaccounts.

You can access the Cost Estimator with the small calculator icon in the SAP Discovery Center top-level bar.