SAP S/4HANA

What is Side-by-Side Extensibility?

Building extensions on SAP BTP that interact with S/4HANA through released APIs and events rather than inside the ERP.

Side-by-side apps run on BTP (ABAP environment, Cloud Foundry, or Kyma) and are decoupled from the ERP release cycle. They suit new UIs, integrations, and workflows. Testing must cover API contracts, authentication, and failure handling between the extension and S/4HANA.

Related terms

SAP Business Technology Platform
SAP's PaaS for application development, integration, data, analytics, and AI services.
Clean Core
SAP's principle of keeping ERP code and configuration close to standard, with extensions built only through stable, released interfaces.
Developer Extensibility
On-stack extensibility where developers use ABAP Cloud in the S/4HANA system itself, restricted to released objects.
Released API
An SAP object such as an API, CDS view, or BAdI that SAP marks as stable for customer use with a release contract.
SAP Event Mesh
SAP's messaging service for event-driven integration, available as Event Mesh and Advanced Event Mesh in Integration Suite.

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Planning an S/4HANA move?

Read the field guides on testing an ECC to S/4HANA migration and grab the free template library.