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chrisaron
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
19,333

October 2024 Update: Before you get started with this blog post that discusses SAP Event Mesh and SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, please note the following updates.

(1). SAP Event Mesh type functionality is now available as part of SAP Integration Suite, standard and premium editions. The intent is to bring together this capability in a harmonious way with our other iPaaS capabilities to provide customers with a versatile and flexible solution set (see related SAP Note).

(2) In addition please read our newly published whitepaper that seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of SAP's event driven architecture (EDA) offerings with related guidance on when to use which capability to achieve your EDA-orientated objectives.

Since SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh launched in June 2022 there has been a lot of excitement from SAP customers, partners and colleagues. Relevant to this interest, I have been getting questions around how SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh corresponds to our existing solutions SAP Event Mesh and SAP Integration Suite. Therefore, I wanted to pen this brief blog to proactively explain how these technologies are complementary to a wider audience.

Part One: Introduction to SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh

Let me start by explaining the new SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh offering. SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is a highly attractive solution for customers seeking to facilitate high-volume real-time business processes as well as EDA scenarios where dynamic filtering and sophisticated tooling is desired (these features are not available with SAP Event Mesh). Examples of which include distributed supply chains, retail point of sale and connected factories where a lot of information is generated that can be harvested and processed quickly as part of cutting-edge real-time business processes that positively impact business performance and/or customer satisfaction.

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh at its core provides customers with the ability to deploy specialized event brokers at the edge of their business network (close to the source of high-volume events), either in public or private clouds. These brokers are intelligent and can implement dynamic filtering to optimize the messages that are sent over the associated event mesh, frequently applying filters according to which topics are being subscribed to by other brokers. This ensures the right amount of information is sent to the right place as soon as an event happens. Below is a high level illustration of a hybrid integrated event mesh.

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Figure 1: Illustration of a Hybrid Integrated Event Mesh

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is packaged in such a way that you can deploy brokers according to the size you need (or upgrade later when traffic increases under our SAP Business Technology Platform Enterprise Agreement aka BTPEA) with associated billing taking place on an hourly basis. This enables you to right-size your specialized broker resources according to the business traffic that is being generated. The associated price point for SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh brokers is significant and is representative of the dedicated resources being made available for this high-performance solution.

Part Two: SAP Integration Suite, SAP Event Mesh and SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh ultimately provides you with a sophisticated transportation capability enabling you to reliably get your data and notification events to where they need to be. SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh as a result provides support for messages of 30MB and message storage that can exceed 1TB to ensure maximum performance for transportation purposes across the event mesh. SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh due to its specialized nature is made available to customers outside of the traditional SAP Integration Suite SKUs via our SAP Business Technology Platform Enterprise Agreement (BTPEA) credit-based model and via SAP's subscription model where you can subscribe to the specific broker sizing and quantities that you need.

When considering the core SAP Integration Suite offer (also available via subscription and BTPEA commercials models) you will quickly see that the solution comes with a holistic set of integration tools including Cloud Integration (including SAP Event Mesh as of Q3 2024). Each service under SAP Integration Suite has different recommendations for message size, and all are smaller than the SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh limits mentioned above. SAP API Management for example has a standard limit of 10MB per API call, Cloud Integration can support a wide range of message sizes depending on the use case, with 250kb being SAP’s standard message size. These cloud services and their associated guidelines are structured according to a fit for purpose framework.

In other words, SAP Integration Suite capabilities are designed with more than high-volume transportation in mind. When leveraging Cloud Integration for example, the flow of data between applications is focused on various functionality centered around exchanging information between applications where transformation and system adapters are important aspects. With API Management policies can be implemented relating to traffic patterns, security and protecting the underlying systems of record.

Below is a high-level illustration of how SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh can be configured to work in a complementary fashion with both SAP Integration Suite and SAP Event Mesh. SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh brokers as described above are deployed at the edge of a customer’s landscape close to the system entities that generate large amounts of data that needs to be processed in real-time to support associated business processes.

SAP Event Mesh can be part of this mesh, subscribing to events generated by SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh brokers. SAP Event Mesh can in turn pass these events to SAP Integration Suite for transformation and processing to the system of record applications that SAP Integration Suite is working with. SAP Event Mesh can also pass on these events directly to the systems of record where no transformation is required.

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Figure 2: Illustration of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh working alongside SAP Event Mesh and SAP Integration Suite

Part Three: SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh and SAP Event Mesh compared

SAP Event Mesh has been available for five years and acts as a centralized approach to event driven architectures and use cases. SAP Event Mesh notably has lower performance thresholds than SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh. For example, SAP Event Mesh has a message size limit of 1MB and message storage limits of 10GB (see comparison table below). SAP Event Mesh is therefore offered with a different use case in mind than SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh with its higher price point and performance capabilities.

SAP Event Mesh is configured centrally and does not offer the distributed deployment options associated with SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh across public and private cloud environments. SAP Event Mesh is offered commercially according to the amount of data throughput, the more data processed the higher the price paid (As of Q3 2024, message consumption when consumed within SAP Integration Suite, standard and premium editions). Unlike SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh there is no need to calculate the size of broker or deployment option needed.

In the illustration above SAP Event Mesh can work in parallel with SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh by being a broker on the associated event mesh. SAP Event Mesh for example can be configured to support events coming from SAP systems and publish them on an outbound basis to SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh brokers that subscribe to these events.

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Figure 3: High-level comparison of SAP Event Mesh and SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh.

Part Four: Optimizing Event Driven Architectures

Asynchronous real-time architectures are themselves very powerful, helping early adopters transform associated business models and helping them achieve competitive advantages through efficient real-time business processes at scale. SAP through our SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh and SAP Event Mesh solutions seek to provide you with flexibility and choice in terms of supporting these desired outcomes.

Modern event driven architectures first surfaced in the financial services sector, where the advantage of high-speed transactions at volume makes complete sense, directly delivering bottom line impact in trading scenarios. The ability to react fast to market changes or leveraging information as soon as it has been received can make all the difference. Now we are seeing many more industries start to adopt these event driven architectures as the benefits of real-time digital business processes become more prevalent.

Let’s take the example of the retailer Elkjøp in the Nordics region. Through the use of event driven architectures they sought to transform their end to end customer experience across digital and physical channels. Elkjøp successfully implemented an event-driven architecture that span 12 legacy systems with 500 interfaces supporting 5M messages per day covering all their customer interactions. Elkjøp was able to create a unified view of all customer activity (online and offline) which helped power advanced analytics around customer behavour. Elkjøp was able to improve the customer experience by providing real-time visibility into inventories facilitating customer self-service for selecting in-store or delivery options as well as self-selection and scheduling for installation services.

Part Five: Why SAP?

More and more SAP applications are supporting events. SAP S/4HANA and SAP SuccessFactors are two excellent examples of this. In the future more SAP line of business applications will support events. Even legacy applications such as SAP Enterprise Central Component (ECC) customers can now take advantage of events: Event-driven architecture – now available for SAP ECC users | SAP Blogs

Customers will also benefit from less vendor complexity by leveraging SAP for both their integration and event management needs. SAP through SAP Integration Suite provides a holistic approach to integration needs covering process integration, API Management and support for event driven architectures. SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh now adds to these capabilities providing specialized capabilities for high-volume events. SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh can also be leveraged in combination with other parts of SAP Business Technology Platform

A great example of this is leveraging event-driven architectures in the context of a composable enterprise approach. Here are two excellent blogs that describe (1) an introduction to event driven architectures in the context of SAP’s application ecosystem by my colleague Karsten Strothmann  and (2) How simplified line of business application extensions can be achieved via event-driven concepts by Elisabeth Riemann.

So hopefully this blog clarified a few things around how SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh fits within your current landscape and how SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh complements other SAP offerings such as SAP Integration Suite and SAP Event Mesh. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and reactions as you get started with your own event driven architecture initiatives.