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034 – Paw Sandal on Microsoft/Azure Integration

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I had the great pleasure of talking with Paw Sandal Pedersen, who is an Microsoft Integration expert at a danish company called Bizbrains. Paw is very experience working with Microsoft integration technologies and I think it was very interesting to hear his oppinion on topics like BizTalk Azure, Logic Apps, Microsoft Flow and EDI.


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 allow you to only pay for the number of actions you perform. This is a new way of making integration possible. It allow integration to get to smaller organisations and run there.

“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 custom connector.”

It is fairly simple to start creating the Logic Apps, but you will need to know how to process documents in the way that is most effecient with regards to the license of pay per action. For some customers the license model is better, where as for other project a BizTalk solution is better.

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 Bizbrains have is a tool to help with EDI partner management just like the B2B Add-on called Link.

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.

Today's episode is all about cloud integration. I'm joined by Marco Verhoef who has worked for the last seven years for a Netherlands utilities company. He has been pushing his company way from SAP-PI and towards cloud integration. The business case for making that transition was largely cost related. Cloud computing was a better solution for a number of reasons. First was eliminating the need for regular updates which was costing his company as much as €50 thousand per year. The hardware costs were dramatically lower as well. Just running the servers cost €6000 per month. Marco has achieved a lot in the two years since he first proposed a cloud strategy. They have installed an Azure environment. They have also implemented field class and an external worker environment. He thinks the field class setup was very similar to using SAP. He found that HCI was not that mature two years ago but by working with the product developers he was able to guide the process. One of the more frustrating issues using SAP was ccBPM. HCI uses one ID and one window to do configuration and development which is much more user friendly than SAP-PI. The entire process took Marco and his team 18 months to complete. Migrating all the interfaces was the biggest task. There have been no performance issues though at times it can be slow. Marco thinks that has more to do with bandwidth limitations rather than a processing issue. Marco says before considering cloud integration you need to know how complicated your current integrations are. Is it core business or just business support? A lot of companies don't even think about going to the cloud for their integration tool. Marco says everyone should at least think about it. It can be as little as €1500 per month. You can just start and create a proof of concept.

002 – Cloud integration stories with Marco Verhoef

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Today’s episode is all about cloud integration. I’m joined by Marco Verhoef who has worked for the last seven years for a Netherlands utilities company called Eneco. He has been pushing his company way from SAP PI and towards SAP cloud Platform integration (CPI aka HCI).

The business case for making that transition was largely cost related. Cloud computing was a better solution for a number of reasons. First was eliminating the need for regular updates which was costing his company as much as €50 thousand per year. The hardware costs were dramatically lower as well. Just running the servers costs €6000 per month.

Marco has achieved a lot in the two years since he first proposed a cloud integration strategy. They have also implemented fieldglass, an external worker SAAS product. He thinks the fieldglass setup was very similar to using SAP PI. He found that CPI was not that mature two years ago but by working with the product developers he was able to guide the process.

One of the more frustrating issues using SAP PI was ccBPM. CPI uses one single integrated development environment to do configuration and development and is much more user friendly than SAP PI.

The entire process took Marco and his team 18 months to complete. Migrating all the interfaces was the biggest task. There have been no performance issues though at times it can be slow. Marco thinks that has more to do with bandwidth limitations rather than a processing issue.

Marco says before considering cloud integration you need to know how complicated your current integrations are. Is its core business or just business support? A lot of companies don’t even think about going to the cloud for their integration tool yet. Marco says everyone should at least think about it. For as little as €1500 per month you can start and create a proof of concept.