In 2023, it should be pretty clear that leveraging cloud is a quintessential part of any sane enterprises IT strategy. With SaaS adoption, the promise of composite IT, leveraging cloud computing and PaaS for building innovations and differentiators, cloud is directly or indirectly at the center of every CIO conversation. And I wonder if the conversation is complete if it doesn't include enterprise iPaaS.
It has been heartening to see the strides made by SAP in the
Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service area. From the early days of HCI to the more recent SAP Integration suite, SAP has continued to push the limits and positioned itself as a leader.
Now the challenge most organisations face when embarking on a transformation journey is usually the decisions that they need to take with their legacy estate. Replacing or migrating off legacy IT investments can be painful (painful is an understatement perhaps). Integration platforms are then no exceptions.
Most CIOs and IT managers would happily love to brush the topic of migrating their legacy integration platforms under the carpet. Rightly so! Migrations are largely manual, time consuming and expensive. One needs to be highly motivated and brave to embark on this journey.
(Said the CIO to his Integration team before the migration project)
In 2023, when something like ChatGPT promises to solve all of humanity's problems (or did it mention eliminating humanity itself?), would it be too much to expect that a migration can be fast, automated and cost effective?
Over the last few years, speaking to several integration consultants, architects and customers, below is what appears to be the common challenges around attempting to migrate a PI/PO landscape to SAP Integration Suite;
- Legacy landscape (PI or PO) could be in place for several years. Having to produce the complete interface and landscape details, the individual interface data/specs, the associated complexities are usually several weeks worth of effort
- Getting accurate and transparent estimation of timelines and cost of migration is a challenge
- Migration activities are heavily manual in nature, almost as if developing from scratch
- Oversight on hidden complexities like value mapping tables, ABAP mappings, ccBPM etc
- Several reconfigurations and redevelopments add up as significant efforts
- Testing the migrated interfaces is another challenge
- In complex and large landscapes, there would be a need to have multiple tenants and making the interfaces seamlessly available including the relevant security policies are time consuming
- Once successfully migrated, having a seamless operations, with optimised OPEX spends is a challenge etc
Having empathetically worked with several integration customers, and understanding the need to help enterprises ease their journey to the cloud, we have now created an
Automated Move to Cloud Integration Solution Package.
The package includes several accelerators and tools that come together to not only help customers migrate their PI/PO landscape to SAP Integration Suite but also to help them further with advanced capabilities around leveraging the best of cloud integration.
The objective of the migration solution is;
- Reduce the efforts around legacy landscape discovery and migration estimation / planning by 50%
- Significantly reduce the migration project timelines - Accelerate the speed by 2-3X
- Thru automated migration, lower the total cost of migration upto 75%
- Support the customer's preferred approach to testing including automated testing of interfaces
- For operations, bring advanced capabilities on top of standard SAP features to help in better monitoring of the cloud integration landscape
To support the above, we leverage the below tools and accelerators that has been developed keeping SAP integration customers in mind;
- PI/PO Assessment Accelerator - A legacy landscape discovery tool that reduces the as-is landscape assessment, documentation, effort estimation and project planning significantly
- Migration Automator - A cloud based 'Click of the Button' migration tool that connects to PI/PO and SAP Integration suite, enabling automated migration of interfaces
- Compare and Clone tool - To help in moving integration and security artefacts between tenants including single to multiple tenants, and also supporting Neo to CF migrations
- Integration Inspector - An advanced monitoring tool for SAP Integration Suite
- and others like Message Mapping Documenter, Deploy / Un-deploy Multiple iFlows, CPI Artifact Extractor Utility etc
While all of the above tools and accelerators can be used independently in its own context, the objective is to bring them together and deliver one of the most painless and seamless migration experience for SAP customers.
If this has in some way triggered your curiosity, feel free to reach out to me over email at
shabarish.nair@tarento.com or on
LinkedIn and we can continue the conversation. If needed, our team would love to host a solution walkthrough and demo to help further understand the value proposition of this offering.
Update [Jul 2023]: The solution now supports Non SAP middleware migration. Read more here.