- SAP Managed Tags:
"SAP Integration Suite is an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) that helps you quickly integrate on-premise and cloud-based processes, services, applications, events, and data. Accelerate innovation, automate more processes, and realize a faster time to value."
This is what sap.com says about SAP Integration Suite, and the statement has just become even more true: your new friend EMIS has arrived ... the new Event Mesh capability of SAP Integration Suite that will be available for all customers using standard and premium editions.
Let's go through this step by step and let's first quickly look at EDAs and their benefits.
Event-driven Architecture
An event-driven architecture is a software architecture using events as the core means for interaction between its software components. Events are significant changes - in our context for example a Sales Order getting created or a Business Partner getting updated in SAP S/4HANA. In an EDA, you are informed about these events in almost-real-time.
Event-driven architectures are a great fit for distributed software environments and allow for minimal coupling. This might result in not only a loose coupling but also a highly flexible software architecture that is constantly changing and adjusting.
EDAs have a number of advantages over more traditional architectural styles, typically building on the loose coupling and the real-time aspect that comes with EDAs:
- The situational awareness is increased by receiving updates on events in other business applications in real time which might result in quicker and better business decisions.
- The loose coupling that comes with EDAs results in an increased flexibility and scalability. In the end this allows to adjust to changing business environments quickly.
- Easy re-use of existing eventing infrastructure providing more comfort and less costs. You set up an eventing infrastructure once and then use it again and again for different events and event sources.
- Open standards like the CloudEvent standard allow to cross vendor boundaries with ease
There are even more advantages like improved fault tolerance, low latency and efficient operations that come on top of the advantages mentioned above.
SAP's Event-driven Ecosystem
To summarize the above: if you have not already done it, you might want to explore event-driven architecture for your integrations.
SAP offers already quite a number of event sources, event broker technology and event consumers. To point out a few highlights in respect to event sources:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud exposes 600+ standard events, most of them extensible and adjustable using different technologies.
- SAP S/4HANA exposes pretty much the same number of SAP standard events and provides similar approaches for extension and adjustments in the newer releases.
- SAP ECC allows for custom events to be created
- SAP SuccessFactors solutions provides the Intelligent Services Events
As for broker technology, SAP offers SAP Event Mesh as part of the SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh as an optional offering of SAP Integration Suite (that is available standalone as well).
If you ask me, SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is the offering that I see most customers ending up with once their EDAs reach a certain maturity level, or a certain scale. Advanced Event Mesh offers extreme scalability and a myriad of sophisticated features. If you are interested in AEM, check it out here.
Some customers though like to start smaller or just want to power smaller or simpler business scenarios. The new Event Mesh in SAP Integration Suite is for them.
Event Mesh in SAP Integration Suite
Event Mesh in SAP Integration Suite is a fully-managed cloud service for enabling applications, integrations and extensions to communicate asynchronously through events. It allows for end-to-end EDAs in or beyond the SAP event-driven ecosystem.
- EMIS as Event-Broker-as-a-Service decouples communication between event sources and event consumers in a plug-and-play fashion
- Business real time event transport and different quality of service levels
- Direct integration to SAP S/4HANA events
- Caters to low to moderate event volumes and includes a focused feature set, perfect for businesses just beginning their EDA journey
- As EDA implementations mature and expand, transition smoothly to Advanced Event Mesh for volume, features and broader landscape coverage
Availability and Rollout
The Event Mesh capability in SAP Integration Suite has just been introduced and we are in the process of making it available. Some of you might have already seen this new capability in your Integration Suites, since we have already started rolling it our across data centers earlier this week. If you haven't seen it yet, it should come for you in the next days. If you have a Standard or Premium edition of SAP Integration Suite that is.
What you should know now
Let's summarize the key pieces of information on EMIS today:
- EMIS is fully integrated in the SAP Integration Suite Cockpit
- Supports the majority of features available with SAP Event Mesh as of Q2 2024
- EMIS will be available for SAP Integration Suite standard and premium editions from 2nd half of June 2024
- Maximum message size is 1MB and spool size for all messages/events to be buffered is 2 GB
- Currently there is no migration support for existing SAP Event Mesh instances. This is planned for later in 2024.
- The new capability will be visible in the provisioning application. After activation an EMIS instance within Integration Suite is created.
Detailed information can be found in SAP Note 3461547 to understand functional and non-functional qualities.
What is planned for Q3 2024
Selected additional features are planned to come in Q3 2024:
- REST and MQTT Support
- Webhook support
- Migration support for existing SAP Event Mesh instances to EMIS
Specifically the REST support that will be important for the add-on connectivity and the migration support that will allows for facilitated migration to EMIS will be important features that are on the horizon.
A Crucial Building Block
I am quite glad that EMIS is available to customers now. It's another, crucial building block in SAP's event-driven strategy. And this strategy is highly important: event-driven architecture is expected to grow at exponential rates year over year and to become a game changer and enabler technology for other technologies - like AI specifically. What does it help if you have the smartest AI agent take decisions based on outdated data? Right, you need real time data ideally, and this is what EDA gives you.
EMIS will lower the hurdle for a lot of SAP customers to get started with EDA. Which is a great thing for somebody like me that is fully convinced of the technology. And, as stated above, I believe that EMIS will be the convenient and easy starting point of an event-driven journey.
In the long run latest I expect that this journey is going to take you to SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh. Because I believe you will simply love EDAs. And you will want to take the next step.
For now: I highly recommend you to take the first step. If you are an SAP Integration Suite customer, have a look at Event Mesh in SAP Integration Suite. It's there now.
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