In May 2021, we won the SAP Hack2Build with a tool that would later become the Figaf Migration Tool. Since that victory, we have made major strides with the migration tool.
It has been an amazing journey from that competition to now with the Figaf Migration Tool. We already were developing migration tools for SAP Process Integration and Process Orchestration. Because of that, when we learned about the SAP Hack2Build covering covering the topic of migrations from SAP PI/PO to SAP Cloud Integration (CPI) we thought that was a natural progression of our products. Moreover, we thought this would be a great opportunity to quickly develop a new tool built on the ideals of Figaf and the already established technology of our SAP PI to PO migration tool.
Recollection: Winning SAP Hack2Build
The invite to SAP’s “Hack2Build-Beyond a Hackathon” was perfect timing. Figaf Founder and CEO Daniel Graversen was already in the process of creating ideas of a migration tool.
Daniel shared his prototype ideas with SAP and what we needed to achieve. With our experience of SAP PI/PO, SAP CPI and related APIs, we quickly did some experiments to validate the prototype idea by modifying CPI IFlows.
Fortunately, we succeeded in the process so it was a good place to start. Within the two weeks (of the Hack2Build) we implemented a prototype that generates SAP CPI IFlows from the ground with routings and conditions.
First Client after SAP Hack2Build
After winning the competition, we thought we can use this new tool and see how it would hold up in “the wild” or in other words see how the Figaf Migration Tool will perform in a real life migration scenario. We managed to get a client with a decent sized migration project to use our product. Let’s just say it didn’t go perfectly well.
Initial Failure
Yes, it didn’t go well. Actually it failed miserably. This was a reminder that the Figaf Migration Tool was just a good idea “on paper”. Additionally, our migration tool wasn’t ready for real-life migration scenarios. Yet, we continued to improve the software and make capable of being productive in real life.
Migration Tool makes major strides
After the first client, we continued to tweak the migration tool and innovate with the Figaf philosophy of automation and simplicity. During the year from winning the SAP Hack2Build to now, we have encountered many challenges and successes with improving the Figaf Migration Tool but also getting more and more clients to optimize their migrations with us.
Challenges
On the way to making improvements this past year, we naturally encountered challenges our tool’s evolution.
- Working with old systems and data that has been processed over the last 15 years of development
- All the different types of logic that can be built with SAP PI/PO that is not in SAP Cloud Integration and is difficult to handle there like content conversion or EO/EOIO (Exactly Once)
Successes
But with all challenges, there were opportunities which led to successes. One major success was seeing customers/partners try the tool and being able to migrate their integrations with just one click and seeing that we support there expected cases.
Moreover, we were able to handle different migration projects in scale and complexity. This was great progress as we continued to scale the migration tool.
Future of the Figaf Migration Tool
It’s been quite a journey this year with a lot of developments and improvements.
Daniel Graversen, Figaf Founder and CEO
Future of migrations
Migrations are not that common right now but we think that will change. There will be a large increase in migrations as the complexity and ambiguity of those migrations will be mitigated or solved. Also, as SAP develops and promotes the Integration Suite while discontinuing support of the SAP PI/PO platform in the coming years, it’s natural to eventually move on the latest SAP Integration system.
We will work with customers/partners on finding the ways where we can improve the tooling mostly to support clients. There are a number of ways we can improve the tool.
Definitely, think that the next few years we will see quite a large of number of migrations happening and a large number of these will be automatic.
Daniel Graversen, Figaf Founder and CEO
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