Overview
Wikipedia defines an event as a “significant change in state”. If for example a Material Master is being updated, other processes in other systems need to be informed. This whole journey of generating the event, channeling and processing is called Event-driven architecture (EDA).
According to industry analysts, customers and user group feedback, event-driven architecture is already an important topic and will most likely become even more central in the future. As an example I still remember the last DSAG annual meeting in Mannheim (sitting in the keynote together with 1000nds of people…), listening to the great
Keynote from Steffen Pietsch (in German only, from 0:32:00 on).
Event-driven architecture with SAP
In the last couple of years, SAP has put a lot of effort into providing holistic support for EDA, just to mention a few highlights:
- Enabled Backend Systems
- Central Event Bus
- Connected Systems
One missing – but important – stakeholder was the group of the SAP ECC customers. To let this group also participate on event-driven architecture we just released the ABAP Add-On
SAP NetWeaver, add-on for event enablement. This Add-On works as an SDK, customers will be able to enable objects with just a few clicks, generating their own content (events). Of course the events generated in an SAP ECC System will follow the same standard (
https://cloudevents.io/) as events coming from an S/4HANA System.
What is the benefit, especially for SAP ECC customers?
Event-driven architecture in general is offering a lot of advantages like decoupling or the avoiding of polling. With this new Add-On, SAP ECC customers particularly, will be able to leverage SAP Cloud Platform as an extension platform even more – as now the event-centric pattern is also supported in addition to REST / OData via SAP Gateway. In combination with SAP S/4HANA this will open up some great new opportunities:
- In order to serialize activities during the SAP S/4HANA Migration, it is now easier to port existing event-driven extensions from SAP ECC to SAP Cloud Platform. A guide on the general topic of side-by-side extensions is available here
- This will bring back your SAP ECC System closer to the standard – and this will then reduce complexity during the migration to SAP S/4HANA
- As SAP S/4HANA already supports events, the switch to SAP S/4HANA will be easy – if you already designed the cloud extension with the SAP S/4HANA Events and OData services accordingly.
Several missions are available showing in more detail on how to extend an S/4HANA System based on event-driven architecture (e.g
https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/#/missiondetail/3156/3192). We are currently working on the same scenario – only using an SAP ECC system instead of an S/4HANA system.
Summary
The Add-On
SAP NetWeaver, add-on for event enablement (ASANWEE) is available for NetWeaver 7.31 and higher (
Documentation) and is based on an ABAP Add-On from the partner company ASAPIO (
https://www.asapio.com/en/index.html), but adapted for the usage with the SAP Cloud Platform.
2020 - Dec 22nd - Update:
2021 - June 1st - Update
- AddOn is now also available for S/4HANA
