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.

Stephen Nilsson

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.

033 – What Integration challenges I see

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In this podcast about Figaf´s Integration Regression Tool I take a look at some of the challenges, that SAP is facing with integration.

As an independent developer of both tools and courses regarding SAP I get to talk to quite a few customers when presenting my tool. And I can see how the tool can help them in the process of planning their workflow.

Some of the most common challenges I see are as follow:

  • How the change in integration
  • Cloud means
  • S4 also impacts the way most will be doing integration

Key question: Where is your architecture?

Many people working with SAP are struggling with understanding CPI and how it should fit into their organization. There seems to be a spike in the number of requests for projects, and the developers have to skilled in both CPI and PI. It is of course very important to ensure that the developers do not break anything. The key question is where your architecture should be.

Automize your  testing

Figaf´s IRT is a tool made for testing. It will automize many of the things you do manuale, and it will lower your number of errors. It will help you test:  

  • What kind of impact it will have.
  • Will be more widly used
  • Hope that we will be the place of choise for customers wanting a better testing framework
  • Will see how we can integrate with it, when customers are there

Monitoring

IRT also offers Monitoring:

  • CPI is quite a different way to monitor than PI.
  • Need some external tool for it

The best way to implement

Finally, IRT gives you great input when you have to find out, when is the best way to implement:

  • If you have the data in the delivery but
  • Can see how the tool fits your organisation
  • Regression when making changes.

023 – Kafka and Events in a SAP context

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One of the new development patterns is the events, and SAP is also embracing it with the new S/4 HANA options. With this show, I have Ramesh Jogula to share something about what the event concept
is and where it fits into an SAP landscape. Ramesh has a strong SAP PI background and is now also working with KAFKA, so it was an ideal way to get some insights on how it would work.

Apache Kafka is one of the big frameworks for handling events and its dynamic scalability feature is the reason to lead in the Microservices architecture space. One of the commercial licenses for it is from  https://www.confluent.io/

On the show, we talk about the change of architecture from Monolith applications as SAP ERP to the newer paradigm of Micro-services.
These are two different concepts, In the micro-services space it makes a lot of sense to handle events and scale the application based on dynamic requirements
We talk about events, the meaning of events and how messages are treated as events. How are the events handled in synchronous and asynchronous patterns.
In Enterprise context, one of the thing that also makes sense is using SAP PI/PO as the API gateway to SAP ERP and KAFKA, which in turn
communicates to BIG data landscape or other enterprise applications with tons of messages/events getting processed across the enterprise.
SAP PI rest adapter can support use cases of the Kafka, but there is an additional option of using Advantco adapter for KAFKA which is a licensed product.

017 – What to expect at SAPPHIRENOW 2018 from a integration perspective

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Next week is SAPPHIRENOW in Orlando, and I’m looking forward to going there to see what is happening with Integration. SAPPHIRENOW is SAPs biggest event with a focus on what new SAP Software customers should be investing in. The conference has a big focus on the business values that SAP is providing and provide good roadmaps of what is to come.

In this episode of the podcast, I’ll be covering my expectations of SAPPHIRENOW and also something about the sessions that are most interesting from an integration perspective.

Last year SAP announced SAP Leonardo as their platform for handling all the cool new things like blockchain, IoT, Big Data and more. I guess it was mostly a branding of their Cloud Platform and some of the services so people could see it was something new.

I’m looking forward to seeing what is coming out of new things from the conference.

I have created a list of the sessions that look most promising from an integration perspective. The list originally appeared on my blog on SAP community.

 

Session ID Title Info
ASUG11011 Integration Architecture for Hybrid System Landscapes Thu
12:30 p.m. – 01:30 p.m.
PL60858 Adopt Winning Strategies for Cloud Integration Thu
03:00 p.m. – 03:40 p.m.
PL60859 Support Rapid Innovation with Straightforward Access to APIs Tue
11:00 a.m.
ASUG10522 APIs and Integration Strategy for SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Wed
11:00 a.m.
LE59486 Discover Extensions and APIs That Drive the Intelligent Enterprise Wed
01:00 p.m
ASUG11987 Integrating SAP S/4HANA Cloud: Road Map and Current Capabilities Wed
01:00 p.m
BA60744 Drive Transformation with Robotic Process Automation and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Thu
01:00 p.m

If you have an idea of sessions I forgot please share in the comments.

 

015 – Workflow in SAP Cloud Platform with DJ Adams

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I’m excited to welcome DJ Adams to The Integration Podcast this week.  DJ has been working with SAP software for more than 30 years.  He was an SAP Mentor for many years but has since retired to become an SAP Mentor alumnus.  DJ has shared a lot on the SAP Cloud Platform Workflow.  He has also written a series of blog posts on the subject where he is using the platform to find which beers he needs to drink next.  With my background on the SAP PI systems and BPMs there now is a gradually transitioning to the cloud so DJ’s experience is hugely valuable for my work.

DJ first started working on R/2 on IBM mainframes in the 1980’s and has been working with SAP software ever since.  He has been fascinated by the cloud platform and has worked with systems outside of the SAP world including Google App Engine.  He never worked much with PI but the workflow service is very closely related to SAP BPM.

Getting started with Workflow is really easy.  It’s available as a trial account on the Cloud Platform.  Users can easily enable it along with the Portal Service and the full stack Web IDE.  You need to define your workflow definitions.  You need nothing other than a web browser to access those services.

The workflow service is about orchestrating services and tasks across applications but also across systems, organizations, and individuals.  There is a service task building block that effectively gives you the ability to make HTTP calls.  You also have script tasks that will let you mess around with the context of the data of the workflow instance.  There is also a mail task.  Then there is the most important step type in a workflow definition which is the user task.  Those let you send tasks to a user to let them be able to interact with that workflow instance.

You don’t need to code very much in the UI when you’re first getting started.  But if you are going to do any meaningful workflows you will need to do some coding to create user task interfaces for the SAP Fiori My Inbox app, which is a master-detail style app. The user task components you build are injected into the component container in the My Inbox app when tasks are selected for processing.  You need to know some SAPUI5 in order to do that, but the team plans to release a forms-based facility to create user task interfaces in the future.

 

 

 

 

014 Testing SAP PI/PO now and in the future, Cloud Integration Testing

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In this episode, I’m sharing what IRT 2.2 is and the future of testing SAP PI/PO and Cloud Integration. I cover some of the new features delivered in release and where I would like to take the tools. 

So my vision is to create to create an integrated development platform for developers to make it a lot easier to monitor what is being delivered. So we will support the developer all the way from an incident or problem, to create a ticket for it. Log the changes made on the ticket and then figure out what to test for it. In this release, we offered a way to look at your repository objects and make comparisons on them to see what the changes in them were. This enables you to assign a ticket to each change and use it i the change management. We also enable you to look at message mappings and the show all ICOs that uses that message mapping. This is the key component in giving you the ability to monitor changes.

The other great feature we added is the ability to test the SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI aka HCI) . We can now do regression test of HTTP scenarios and for other scenarios, you need to have resent the same messages. In 2.3 we are giving you the option to also test other scenarios and help you select the locations you want to compare. We have made this progress in the two weeks since the trace functionality was released for cloud integration. The trace allow us to get messages from all steps of the processing just by change the log level of the flow. It was quite lucky that it was released now and we did not have to make a lot of modifications to the flow to get correct logging messages.

Have a look at the blog about the release to read all about the features at release note blog about the cloud testing and the change management of SAP PI