SAP Integration Suite’s evolution in recent times

[Saritha_K]

This is my first blog post in Integration Space covering details on how the Integration Suite has evolved in the recent times. My main aim in writing this blog is to shed some light on the new offerings which seem to be quite promising in the integration space. Hope it would be useful for someone who wants to venture in this space further.

• Introduction:

With the advancement of technology, customer landscapes are no longer confined to limited applications and solutions. This adds on to lots of complexities that need to be addressed at various levels in terms of data silos, processes, applications, landscapes(A2A, B2B, B2G, IoT etc), security, authorisation etc. Considering the latest trends and customer needs, SAP has also positioned SAP Cloud Integration Suite as one of the key pillars of Business Technology Platform.

Why choose Cloud Platform Integration Suite?

Fast Evolving Customer Landscapes

Customer landscapes have now started encompassing wider systems and technologies for getting a holistic view of their business. In doing so, traditional integration middleware solutions are not able to meet the complex needs that are being asked for. They also lead to lengthy implementations along with need for significant consulting efforts.

There is a need to build intelligent enterprises to bring in digital interactions, and intelligence under one roof. At the same time, the integration mechanism should also be simple enough to be setup quicker thereby reducing project costs and timelines.

SAP Integration Suite

To address to all these problems, SAP came up with a versatile, dynamic, and enterprise-grade platform that can simplify integration for people with diverse skill sets through a variety of integration approaches known as “SAP Integration Suite”.

Pre-packaged integration scenarios provide ready-to-go integrations and can rapidly reduce development times. API and digital teams can build semantic APIs to accelerate digital applications

Hence, we are writing this blog to provide a basic overview on how integration has evolved in recent times to promote SAP Cloud Integration Suite for customer landscapes. We give a brief view on how the whole framework has been setup and expanded to meet futuristic needs of customers.

Framework:

• Core Principles : SAP bases its integration strategy for the Intelligent Enterprises on four core principles:


• Out-of-the-box integration


• Open integration


• Holistic integration


• AI-Driven integration

Out-of-the box integration – Pre-packaged integration content for SAP Cloud Platform Integration builds the foundation for integrating applications of the Intelligent Enterprise.

Open Integration - SAP provides feature-rich, prebuilt connectors for more than 150 non SAP applications.

Holistic Integration - Based on SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite and SAP HANA Data Management Suite, SAP supports all types of integrations use cases, ranging from process, data, user and IoT to analytics-centric integration.

AI-Driven Integration -SAP Cloud Platform Integration Advisor service for SAP Cloud Platform is an example of bringing AI intelligence as it makes use of crowd based machine learning approach to define, maintain, share and deploy B2B(business to business) and A2A(application to application) integration content much faster than building it from scratch.

• Features & Capabilities:

 

• Real-time API-based integration supports omnichannel access & dramatically improves customer experiences. It hides the complexity of underlying heterogeneous landscapes.

 

• Orchestration uses workflows and business rules to build process-based digital applications by integrating data silos and creating simplified experiences for customers, employees and partners.

 

• A digital integration hub creates a real-time digital access layer to insulate heterogeneous transactions back ends using in-memory data grids and microservices-based architectures.

 

• Event-driven integration supports decoupled integrations across applications, the Internet of Things and people- enabling sense and respond patterns with enterprise messaging and serverless function as a service.

 

• Ecosystem and marketplaces are dominating business collaboration for organizations, and customers are using open API's to integrate into marketplaces. The suite enables to build ecosystems through digital channels & create new revenue streams by monetizing APIs.

 

• Open API's with rich semantics such as OData and Open API specification, SAP API Business Hub were key aspects to be looked at.

 

• Open Connectors provided harmonized API supporting business events across integration hubs to bring simplicity, flexibility & agility in integrations.

 

• Pre-packaged ready-to-go integrations have accelerated the integration projects from months to days now.

 

• Offerings:


• Out-of-box integrations - 1100+ pre-packaged Content


• Semantic API's - 1000 APIs from SAP and Partners


• Open Connectors for hub-based integrations - 160+ Connectors to third party apps


• Machine Learning automates interfaces & mappings -Integration Advisor.


• Multicloud deployment offerings- SAP, Hyperscaler, private cloud

Different Options Available for Exploration:

SAP has provided various options that can be selected to setup an effective integration framework based on customer’s needs and requirements.  We are listing below the various options that are available as of now –

 

Option	Description
·         SAP API Business Hub	Possesses blueprints, one domain model, API’s events, integration packs.
·         API Management	Expose data as API’s and provides provisions for managing API lifecycle e2e.
·         SAP GRAPH	Harmonized API’s for SAP
·         Integration Advisor	AI-based integration, and metadata management
·         Cloud Integration	End to end process integration
·         Data Intelligence	Data integration, orchestration, and AI
·         Enterprise Messaging	Sense and respond to business events
·         Open Connectors	Accelerate connectivity to non-SAP apps & data
·         Serverless Runtime	Functions to respond to events

 

 Conclusion:

Having read all these information, thus we now see a lot of potential in our cloud offerings which can be easily leveraged to meet the customer’s current as well as futuristic demands. I plan to publish short series on the above mentioned options to showcase on how they fit in for various scenarios as such. Hope you found this section informative.

Please do feel free to like, share or add in your comments or suggestions.

 

References:

There is a guided journey available on sap learning hub which provides all the information on cloud platform integration suite. from a certification point of view.

https://help.sap.com/doc/e59b5089e9ce49e5ab6b4834d4f98f49/TechEd2020/en-US/993b69fb8ad74d38a2ae5895d...