Lower TCO and speed up development with SAP Build

And as if reaching those goals isn’t challenging enough on its own, it also matters how quickly you can get there. In today’s fast-moving business landscape, urgency is critical—delays in deploying new technology solutions directly translate to missed market opportunities, lost revenue, and mounting technical debt. The pressure on IT teams continues to grow, while budgets and developer resources remain constrained.

Modern development tools like SAP Build offer a powerful differentiator, allowing organizations to deliver features faster, adapt to changing market demands, and reduce reliance on hard-to-come-by senior developer talent. These tools drive immediate business impact across industries—from enabling financial services and retail to launch customer-facing features in days, to helping supply chain-dependent sectors like manufacturing and logistics to pivot quickly. At the same time, standardized development patterns and automation help reduce technical debt and lower TCO, making time-to-delivery a core element of business strategy.

To find out the true value of SAP Build for transforming the development process, analyst firm GigaOm conducted a TCO analysis comparing SAP Build with traditional custom development. In addition, the firm created a CxO decision brief to help decision-makers understand the criteria for selecting a development platform that lowers TCO. In this article, we’ll explore their findings.

What is SAP Build?

First of all, what is SAP Build? It’s a comprehensive application development solution that lets you build enterprise applications using a suite of low-code, pro-code, generative AI, and AI-assisted tools designed to streamline development and expedite time to market. Not only can SAP Build modernize the development environment by reducing technical debt and maintenance costs associated with legacy code, it’s also the superior platform for developing SAP-specific applications. It represents a significant advancement in application development, providing a smarter, faster way to build enterprise applications.

SAP Build enables companies to:

• Create enterprise apps with generative AI, optimized for Java and JavaScript application development.
• Use low-code tools when creating and augmenting enterprise applications, such as visual interfaces and drag-and-drop.
• Use ABAP environments for developing applications and extensions, offering the flexibility of side-by-side deployment on SAP Business Technology Platform or on-stack integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
• Automate manual processes, along with process flows, with drag-and-drop simplicity.
• Create digital workspaces to connect and collaborate across enterprise applications in one place.

SAP Build vs. custom development

Custom development offers flexibility, but often at a higher cost. The TCO analysis conducted by GigaOm highlights several ways that SAP Build wins over traditional development approaches.

Key takeaways on the concrete technical outcomes of developing in SAP Build include:

Projects are completed in less than half the time compared to traditional development due to SAP Build’s simplified workflows, automated service implementation, and integrated testing capabilities.

In software development, the overall labor expenditure required to complete any piece of work is defined not only as time, but also as effort through measurement units known as story points. GigaOm explains, “Unlike time estimates, story points are a relative measure of complexity and effort, where higher numbers represent more complex or time-consuming tasks.”

The analysts found that by using SAP Build’s comprehensive capabilities for low-code and AI through the integrated Joule copilot, development teams became far more efficient—sometimes lowering their expended effort from 78 story points to only 32.

Organizations can rely more on junior developers for operational tasks, achieving substantial labor savings. Senior developers, who are often scarce, can then focus on more strategic IT projects.

AI-driven automation enhances efficiency, ensuring higher data quality and consistency.

Qualitatively, SAP Build provides benefits such as:

• Lower maintenance costs GigaOm credits the Cloud Application Programming (CAP) model, as well as the solution’s AI features, as being the core reasons that SAP Build enables lower development and maintenance costs.
  
  
  CAP is SAP’s foundational framework of languages, libraries, and tools for building enterprise-grade cloud applications. This programming model also guides developers along a path of proven best practices and out-of-the-box solutions for recurring development tasks.
  
  The analysts also note that the combination of visual development tools, AI-assisted coding, and high-level abstraction of enterprise services in SAP CAP through SAP Build require significantly less code, which reduces long-term maintenance efforts.
• Seamless integration Designed to work effortlessly with existing SAP systems, SAP Build eliminates integration challenges typically faced with third-party development tools. SAP Build also enables integration with non-SAP systems and applications.
• Unified development environment Whereas traditional development often requires mastering multiple, disconnected technologies, SAP Build consolidates tools and frameworks into a single platform.
• Robust developer support Through structured learning paths, extensive documentation, official support channels, and developer communities, SAP Build fast-tracks adoption and reduces ramp-up time.

Who's the best fit for SAP Build?

For businesses looking to streamline and accelerate their development processes, as well as future-proof their IT investments, SAP Build is a strong contender.

Using CAP, AI, and a comprehensive set of low-code and process automation tools, developers can focus on delivering business value rather than managing operational tasks.

Try SAP Build for 30 days

Get access to your free basic trial and begin building business applications, automating processes, and designing digital workspaces with AI-assisted low-code and pro-code tools.

Start the trial