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
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.
032 – Successfactor integration with Luke Marson
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I had the pleasure of having Luke Marson as a guest in the Integration Podcast who is a solution architect at Ixerv. He is an experienced solution architect and widely-recognized expert in SuccessFactors and SAP ERP HCM. He Provides end-to-end HR and HR technology strategy, advisory, assessments, roadmaps, transformation, optimization, and implementation services for large, global enterprise customers.
Luke Marson has been around the SAP space for a decade, more than half of that is within the SAP SuccessFactors space. He has been solution architect, integration architect, a lead consultant, a project director and also different roles over the years, working with customers on SAP SuccessFactors transformations.
A proven, powerful integration platform
There are a few different options, you can look at it from a perspective of middleware technology, from API´s and then from functionality within SuccessFactors itself. So, from a middleware perspective when you subscribe to employ central, as part of the subscription customers will get a subscription for SAP Cloud platform integration, and that essentially provides you with an unlimited amount of integration connections as long as one end of the integration, either the inbound or outbound, is touching the employee central system. Now it is a proven, powerful integration platform, previously SAP had up in the atmosphere into the employee central subscription. That´s still available for customers on request, most costumes are getting the news in the SAP cloud platform integration as their middleware employee central.
There are two core foundational API´s, there is the SuccessFactor API, that’s the original SOAP-based API and now the OData V2 and V4 that are taking over. There is also the Integration Center that allows business users to perform integration and developing reports them self. There is some collaboration between the two sides.
After doing a SuccessFactors project I do understand some of the complexity of the suite and what needs to be integrated. We cover some of the pre-packaged content where a lot of the modifications is because of customization on the backend SAP systems. Here some of your customizations will cause the integration to be more difficult.
031 – SAP Open Connectors
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I had the pleasure of having Bogdan Petrescu as a guest in the Integration Podcast. He is the director of Strategic Accounts at Cloud Elements – a fast growing API integration platform for SaaS companies and enterprises. I think we had a great talk, and it was very interesting to hear Bogdan Petrescus thoughts on what SAP Open Connectors can do.
One of the key challenges for integration strategy for SAP customers and partners are becoming connectivity to third-party applications. One gap has been the ability for those services to make the third part application easier so that users don’t have to build their own connectors.
Open Connectors is a way to fill that gap and take all the amazing integration services, that have already been delivered and continue to be innovating and basically add third part connectivity as a component directly in the product. Developers working on the platform of Cloud Elements do not have to work with other types of API or connectivity message, everything on the open connectors platform is exposed to a rest API.
170 application connectors
The Open connector platform has about 170 application connectors which are market-leading apps across marketing, sales automation, payments and more. It is possible to build new connectors to every endpoint who is offering an API.
When it comes to mapping data that’s traveling between SAP a not SAP-systems it can be quite a challenge because those applications are not requiring to maintain any kind of standard data model of course. So along with the mapping method, one of the normalization components is the ability to work with consumer data. As long as the endpoint to CPI that is used in the connector allows access to the custom data, is will be possible to translate that through API´s.
So when you are building those virtual data resources or even doing mapping and CPI which works perfectly as well, you are working with a full payload and not just a standard field of objects.