Enterprise Integration is a bit challenging and the field is moving so fast that nobody is able to follow what is going on. That is what Integration Podcast covers.
We focus on the SAP Integration platforms from SAP PI/PO, SAP Cloud Integration, API Management, Gateway and Cloud Platform. There are so many different tools, on which you must be looking to understand what is relevant.
We also are cover the other techniques going on to make sure that your Enterprise works.
Daniel Graversen has worked with SAP Integration for 15+ years. Over the years, there have been several frustrations about how to make different software and tools work optimally for the customers.
Daniel is an SAP Mentor and a part of the community around SAP.
Daniel is both developing software for SAP Integration, blogging about integration and migration, training people in using the tools, and advising companies in getting the most out of their SAP Integration.
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Episodes
036 – Sravya Talanki SAP Integration
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In this episode of the Integration Podcast, I had Sravya Talanki Head of Integration at KeyTree to share some of her ideas about integration strategy that is fit for the future and how they are coping with Covid19 situation.
Sravya has written a number of posts about SAP Integration like the Best practice for SAP CPI and also shared some of her project experiences about integration and how we should approach API first strategy in the last webinar on SAP CPI integration.
In the podcast, we spoke about the following topics:
Covid-19 and the effect on the organization and leadership. Keytree has built Matrix booking tool that allows employees to book desks, monitor occupancy in real-time, for customers to safely open the office, and also has the facility to warn employees if office capacity has been reached.
API strategies is one of the key areas that many customers are looking for getting some guidance and insight on where to start. Sravya has the following suggestions for getting started:
- Pilot MVP project first and brace yourself with an agile mindset. For Example, Be bold enough to change the solution architecture component or data model or add more features throughout the sprints.
- Constantly Engage and Educate your API Consumers and perform a show and tell your API audience regularly. There is no point in building wonderful API(S) with no consumers and hence engagement is critical to evaluate the pulse of the consumers.
- Provide the right Incentive for API project implementation and adoption as well, if you need to be agile then you need to be flexible enough with a budget as well. It may be a bit more expensive to enhance the API now than the budget, but it will give you are more reusable API.
One of the projects Keytree has been involved in is the high volume of data load into SAP C/4 HANA Cloud system via CPI Enterprise Edition and CPI(Process Integration + Data Services) can do ETL if migration doesn’t require complex transformation and we need to migrate from many source systems
We talk about which platforms customers must understand for integration and what is important. Getting to use ISA-M to understand the different patterns is important. There is no one size fits all.
I’m glad that I finally got a new session recorded in the podcast. I hope you will enjoy the conversation.
035 – Blockchain and integration
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Blockchain has been one of the hottest trends in the last few years. It said that it would be a way to improve trust between organizations. It seems like people want to understand what it can do. I think it can be a little difficult really to understand what is going on in the area and what the benefit of it is.
In this episode of the Integration Podcast, I’m interviewing Stephan Nilsson from Unisot(The Universal Source Of Truth). Stephan has been working a long time in the SAP Integration space and we even had some time to work on a project together a long time ago. Now he is working with SAP Integration Architecture and Blockchain, so the perfect candidate so share what blockchain can be used to in an enterprise setting.
I have not seen much use in using blockchain and value in having a distributed database. In the podcast i did learn about some interesting apsects of what it can do.
Stephan and Unisot were working with making it easy to integrate directly from SAP ERP that could then transmit invoice and another document directly into the blockchain. They are using BDI (a blockchain version of EDI) to transport the data. They are mapping the documents to UBL which is a global standard for exchange business documents. So it should be simple to get started with it.
The choise come to choise which blockchain to use. They have used Bitcon SV(Satoshi’s Vision) which is able to handle many transactions pr second at a low cost. It is a public chain that everybody can access. Your documents can only be decrypted by the parties you want to see the data. So you can share data with your partner and the tax authories. It also support smart contracts so you can have payments as a part of the process.
We did talk about SAPs different blockchains products. Stephans though on this was that they are essentially just replicated databases and something that you have in a trusted network of partners.
We also talked about the business cases for it. During the 6 months, he had gotten many requests from people to ask if a problem can be solved by blockchain. It was not the other way around to start with blockchain and then find something to solve it with. We covered an example of how the salmon industry could use blockchain, so consumers could see the full lifecycle of the fish they are buying. This will allow premium vendors to take more for their product to show history.
Sorry for the bad audio, i hope it can provide some value for you.
034 – Paw Sandal on Microsoft/Azure Integration
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I had the great pleasure of talking with Paw Sandal Pedersen, who is
BizTalk
We did have a talk about BizTalk. It have been evolving much like SAP PI for the last long time. Microsoft have not wanted to say a lot about the future of the product, as they wanted more cloud usage. Now they have released plans of a 2019 version to give customers support for longer duration and the ability to integrate more with the cloud.
Logic Apps can be used by anyone
We talk about Logic Apps. It is Microsoft Serverless technology that
“Logic apps is this new way of creating integration, so as a developer you don’t have to think about which servers, you just pay pr. action, there is a lot of connectors, that helps you to connect to a system“, paw says and continue: “There are 300 connectors at the moment that Microsoft supplies, and you also have the possibility to create
It is fairly simple to start creating the Logic Apps, but you will need to know how to process documents in
There is also the Flow service, which allow business users to create Logic Apps without much knowledge on the background processing. So a Citizen integration approach.
EDI Integration
One of the products that
I can see it gives a number of features in a more user friendly way, like partner management, documents tracking and easy creation of new EDI agreements. Often this is more or less only for developers or It Admins. It is possible to integrate with SAP using BizTalk SAP Adapter or Logic App SAP Connector, but there is currently no possibility to use SAP PI/PO as an engine for transformation and transport of the documents. If more customers ask then it could be relevant.
Many customers talk about API is the way to go but if you have 300 partners it can be a lot easier if you can follow one common approach for handling your partner integration.
We also talk about the Peppol a new standard for exchanging e-Invoices with European governments and also businesses. It contains the option to lookup partner information and then uses it for sending the data to providers. It will be interesting to see how the adoption of it will be.
We discussed that and other topics during the Integration Podcast. It was interesting to see how much Microsoft and SAP is looking when viewing their approach for integration.