SAP’s integration for cloud platforms on hyperscalers: Part Two – SAP integration for cloud platforms continued…

Part Two – SAP integration for Cloud Platforms continued…

In part one of this two-part Blog series on SAP Integration and Cloud Platforms with Hyperscalers, we framed the Hyperscaler and the key necessity of interoperability. The second part continues this path of integration with an introduction to the SAP Integration Suite and its all-encompassing offering, recognised as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (EiPaaS) in the cloud[1].

SAP Integration Suite

The panacea of SAP integration in the cloud is the SAP integration suite that fully commits to meeting the four common problems of current architecture strategies as defined in the ISA-M (Integration Solution Advisory Methodology).

When you have a diverse and complex Hybrid landscape, the integration needs are key to attaining that intelligent enterprise[2].As depicted in image[3], the SAP Integration Suite has a very tidy offering out of the box.

Cloud Integration as a key capability of SAP Integration Suite is provided as a cloud service that is based on the industry standard Cloud Foundry and enables integration of end-to-end business processes via messaging. Messaging is via adapters that send or receive the messages that are processed on the Integration Suite platform.

The Cloud Connector provides the secure communication from the back-end systems to the SAP private/ Hyperscaler/Multicloud, which is out of the box and enables these messages to be sent and received securely. There are over 160 connectors to simplify connectivity to SAP and non-SAP systems.

Open Connectors – standardises connectivity to 170+ applications from anything like Document services, e-commerce, CRM to Helpdesk to social media.

• This enables Application-to-Application, Business-to-Business, Business-to-Government scenarios.

Cloud Integration – build, manage and monitor integration flows.

• This takes on the UI as we see in SAP Data Intelligence and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud with the data flow definition in Data Builder.
• There are pre-defined integration packages (2000+) that can be used to simplify this integration.

API Management – design and publish APIs for self-service applications and data sources across the organisation.

• Connects companies with business partners and customers through API marketplaces.

API Business Hub – a central repository for everything relating to APIs, with pre-packaged solutions, business services and sample apps created by SAP and selected partners.

SAP Graph – enables you to build new extensions and applications via Low-code.

• Using APIs to access SAP business data in a unified way.

Integration Advisor – develops interfaces and mappings by using crowdsourcing and Machine Learning (ML).

• AI used to collaborate with business partners for Business-to-Business messaging.
• Crowdsource to improve mapping knowledge and base.

Event Mesh – manages messaging capabilities in applications and services across hybrid landscapes.

• Event messaging has been the backbone of SAP products, and supports SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, other SAP solutions and third-party applications.

Data Intelligence – is a standalone product within the SAP BTP offering, that can be delivered either on-premise or cloud (via SAP BTP) and provides all integration, orchestration, data governance and connectivity. It uses AI and ML to automate, profile and compute intelligent insight across your enterprise data needs.

• SAP Data Intelligence (previously SAP Data Hub with ML/AI added) is the key product for integrating SAP and non-SAP data at scale and underpins SAP BTP as the integration service of choice within SAP Integration Suite.
  • Key integration, workflow and API to SAP products.
  • Built in connectors to distributed or external data systems, be it cloud storage or API to external systems like Azure Data Lake, Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, HDFS.
• Data Orchestration is the key automation of data driven processes from end to end, which enables you to orchestrate the preparation/cleansing of data, to then make decisions based on that data and actions based on those decisions.
  • Orchestrating data from IoT sensors via Kafka to then publish to BW/4HANA.

• It uses standard container methodology like Docker and orchestrates the container with Kubernetes as its foundation. These underpin the Hyperscaler technologies.

The key use case for SAP Data Intelligence (SAP DI) is its offering as a common unified data management platform for data integration, management, orchestration and governance across a complex cloud or hybrid landscape.

• It is where you can build robust orchestrated data streams and unify existing data loads.
• It provides and aligns to industry best practice in a data platform, with enterprise data governance.
• The Data Catalog and lineage standard functionality with SAP DI is a key pillar to a data management solution.
  • It provides metadata crawlers that trawl all connected systems and gives you a view across the landscape as to what metadata is present, for you to then profile and search via the metadata explorer.
• SAP DI is also positioned as a leader in the data fabric platform by Forrester Wave[4].

As SAP’s Enterprise integration platform as a service (EiPaaS), SAP Integration Suite allows you to seamlessly integrate on-premise and cloud-based applications and processes with tools and prebuilt content managed by SAP[5]. It provides business agility to connect people, processes, data, and devices anywhere to meet the needs of the intelligent renewable enterprise.

Summary: Intelligent Integration

If you run your heterogenous or hybrid landscape through a Hyperscaler or SAP, with SAP solutions at its core, but have multiple non-SAP sources or targets, or you want to leverage and take advantage of Machine Learning, API’s and IoT, then it would make sense to use SAP Integration Suite technology. This enables the standards and governance of integration, development and data management, with SAP Data Intelligence as the underlying integration engine, to maintain the semantics and orchestration to your data platform. Even with non-SAP, SAP DI fits into the architecture with connectors and provides the end to end integration.

Further Reading:
https://preprod.wcms.capgemini.com/partner/sap/
https://preprod.wcms.capgemini.com/2021/02/hyperscalers-and-managed-services/
[1] Gartner – Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service [eiPaaS]
[2] SAP – the Intelligent Enterprise

From SAP:
[3] SAP Blog – SAP Integration, Principles & Methodology
[4] SAP Data Intelligence – Leader in Forrester Wave: Enterprise Data Fabric
[5] SAP Integration Suite
SAP offerings on Hyperscalers
SAP Integration Suite – Help.sap.com
SAP Discovery Center – Integration Suite Cloud Integration
Intelligent Enterprises are Integrated Enterprises