SAP integration was one of the popular topics at this years TechEd, where Integration Suite made it to the keynote. See the keynote start from minute 35:00.
There was 13,000 Customer of Integration Suite which is a lot. There is a lot of pre-delivered content that helps customers on their journey.
There is a new license for SAP Grow and SuccessFactors customers that can use pre-delivered content plus a fixed number custom iFlows. I think this will make it possible for smaller customers to learn SAPs platform and hopefully expand their usage later.
There were more adapters added to make it easier to connect. And there is also a focus on Edge Integration Cell that allows you to run your own integration.
A rundown of all the announcements regarding SAP Integration Suite can be read here.
AI in SAP Integration
AI was a big topic for SAP on the keynote and was for all applications. And it was shown at the keynote.
The main use case SAP show for AI in this release was a button to optimize the code. A pretty simple use case just send the code and get some ideas on how to improve it. It will only be for Premium subscription.
SAP can specify what a good Groovy script should look like and the patterns they support. This could be different than using OpenAI for it.
I don’t see much value in it because customers are not paying for CPU resources in Cloud Integration. You could have the potential where you need to improve response time where it could matter.
There is also probably 5-10 different ways such code can be improved. Hopefully, developers will learn about the processes.
Making such big changes to your code will require you to have good testing of the code before and ensure that the change does not impact anything.
In Figaf, we already have an “AI” bot to help you generate Groovy code. It can also come with suggestions to optimize your scripts. Or get help when writing your code and use your tests cases as an input for it. The main thing is that you can easy write run the code and check it before saving it.
Migration to SAP Integration Suite
SAP talked about their new pattern-based migration. Going a way from templates. I do think his is the only way to perform migration and also how we started building our migration tool long time ago. We will be exploring this new option that you already now can use for the migration.
Support for Java mappings in the migration. This will simplify some migration but is not really a good way to go for such scenarios because it will just leave you with some legacy that someone later down the line needs to figure out.
The migration assessment comes with Modernizing suggestions. Sure it makes sense to go away from IDOC, but do you have the bandwidth to redesign all your integration to
And I don’t get tired of seeing the Figaf logo presented at SAP TechEd. We recommend that you start exploring the Figaf Migration Edition.
As a part of the migration journey from Neo, Figaf also has tools that can support the transition. It is the last time you can clean up in your SAP Integration so why not spend the time on it. That is what Figaf can do. See more on the Neo to Integration Suite/CF journey here. SAP has been updating their postman collection also.
Roadmap for migration
There are some interesting aspects in the roadmap for migration
- Dualstack migration (already possible in Figaf)
- Support for Pipeline Concept in migration (already in Figaf)
- Mass migration
- Migration of B2B Integrations
- Modernizing integration During migration
The first 2 cases are quite interesting and something that we are already using with customers.
The mass migration is a strange thing. Sure you can migrate 10 ICO at once. But if you anyway have to perform manual actions on all 10 it is not a lot you save on this. Plus if you need to remigrate the list you have to start over. It sounds cool, but not something that will reduce the effort of migration
B2B migration is interesting. A large part of all customer integration is EDI, and it is not going to change. SAP should make it easy to migrate it and run it in the new way. I do think it is easiest to reuse the existing message mapping and plug them into TPM. This if Figaf’s way of handling it. It will be interesting to see how SAP will solve the challenge.
DevOps for the Integration Suite
Nuno Pereira, (see the session here) had a good session where he covered a lot about the different ideas that could be used for SAP Integration. There were a few good use cases for scenarios.
- Mass configuration of parameters for lots of iFlow
- Generating Documents and Using AI to condense some of the content for the for documentation
- Landscape report of what versions are deployed in each area
- They had their own version for the pipeline concept where they used the Partner Directory for managing some iFlows. They had some scripts to update the PD with the values.
It shows that you can build a lot with Jenkins and the Integration Suite APIs.
If you want to get started with DevOps I would recommend exploring Figaf DevOps suite first. Here you can get most of the features that Nuno talks about out of the box and then a few more that we are able to generate.