This is the third blog in a series that will look at the following 5 perspectives that are changing in the SAP world:-
Once upon a time selecting the way to integrate to and from SAP was simple – the rule was use Exchange Infrastructure (XI) that quickly became Process Integration (PI), which was a combined ABAP and Java solution.
Now the world has moved on and the SAP solution set supporting process and data integration has grown massively, it now includes:-
Based in feedback from stefan.weisenberger (see comments below), I have added these two options as well
So plenty of options and you can’t apply the old rules…
Note : Most Middleware components can run in AnyDB as well as HANA
So where do you start? Read on to find out.
I see lots of SAP implementations, where the integration between systems is quite frankly locked in the last century. Some do not even use PI (“preferring” to dump and ship flat files), those that do use PI, often use it as a point to point file shipping service.
Anyway I will not dwell on the integration horror stories I have seen, but focus more on how you can start to take advantage of the long list of capabilities above.
The first thing to do is to analyze your integration issues / requirements. This means stepping back from your landscape and figuring out what isn’t happening in real-time, and once you have completed step 2 below, you can map the solutions to the issues / requirements.
So why is real-time so important? The answer in 4 words is “The Internet of Things”, another answer in 3 words is “The Networked Economy”, another in 2 words is “Omni-channel” and another in 1 word is “Amazon / Competitors”. If your systems are not updated in real-time and working as a cohesive unit, you will give the wrong answers to your customers, place the wrong orders with your suppliers, fail to meet your service commitments and produce the wrong products.
Whilst one SAP HANA system with all data in one place might be your target architecture, this isn’t going to happen overnight AND even when you achieve it, you will still need your “HANA Island” to talk to those of your customers, suppliers and partners.
As a starter for 10, look for these types of issues:-
The second step that can be run in parallel with the first one, is to understand what the options are. If you are an SAP customer, http://service.sap.com/roadmap is a good place to start, with the product roadmaps and current capabilities spelt out in the well-known “Today – Planned Innovations – Future Direction format.” - see supporting information below to jump to the key roadmaps. Some key new features to highlight would be:-
A common first step when you look at the above products will be to decide that you need to migrate from Dual Stack PI to Java only PO. It is a migration, as the change in architecture required to simplify the landscape and increase performance, needed some of the technical debt to be left behind. The migration also means that the transfer does not need to be big bang, with integrations moved across group by group, reducing the business risk.
SAP have delivered migration tools to move what is good from your PI landscape and often it is an opportunity to re-work interfaces or re-implement them in tools that are better suited to the job (e.g SAP Gateway, SAP API Management and SAP Data Services).
As with all areas of the SAP product set, deciding to run your new landscape on HANA will bring more features and benefits, such as being able to run PO, OpInt and ESP all on one landscape with zero duplication of data.
Finally the rubber needs to hit the road and you need to create an implementation plan. Usually this will see the issues / requirements listed above put into a timeline with associated costs / benefits driving how quickly the transition from a flat-file/batch organization to real-time will take.
If you go through the above process, I predict two things:
This link below gets you to all the roadmaps from Product from SAP (you need an S-user).
This is the link to the SAP PO roadmap - , and this is a webinar from May 2014 by the product managers
This is the link to the SAP HCI roadmap - and this is a webinar from July 2014 by the product managers
This is the link to the SAP OpInt roadmap
This is the link for the SAP Gateway roadmap
This is the link for the SAP Gateway for Microsoft
This is the link to SAP API Management
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