Figaf Friday: The Real Cost of a SAP Integration

When dealing with any case, it is important to understand the real business value of a problem. That includes understanding the cost of a SAP Integration. SAP Integration is a topic that covers SAP PI/PO and also SAP Integration Suite/SAP Cloud Integration aka SAP CPI.

Integration can be seen in a much broader SAP perspective which will not be covered in this post.

SAP Integration costs are based on a mixture of the following

  1. Licensing of the platform
  2. Development cost of new integration
  3. Support of the integration
  4. Price of upgrade and migration
  5. Governance
  6. Team

It is not just a simple look at one factor to understand the cost of a SAP Integration. There are many factors and let’s take a look at each one below.

Licensing of the platform 

As in all cases, there is a large number amount that goes to the licensing.

SAP is no longer selling the on-premise version SAP PI/PO. It had over the years different license models.

Now you only have the option to purchase SAP Integration Suite at 4.000 EUR pr tenant pr month. There is a version for only 800 EUR, with some limitations. See the pricing and comparison here. Then you pay for traffic on the platform. The more you use, the cheaper each message becomes. We do see people trying with fewer than 3 tenants and that works out well.

Other platforms have somewhat similar pricing. The price consist of support, development, operation and running the application.

You can use build your own integration and build on top of Kubernetes or a hyper scalers Function as a service. It will require you to build your own setup and have a good team to support you. It may be cheaper now, but you need to run the platform for the next 10 years and then be able to find people to support it.

For some scenarios, the high starting is a barrier that you need to resolve. If you just have one integration using some simple mapping, CPI may not be the

Development of integration 

This is one of the easy costs to understand. You need some time to develop each integration. Some integration can be delivered quite fast because the platform has some pre-delivered packages like Integration Suite or it has some ML/AI models to help with the mapping.

There will always be a requirement for manual development. How much depends on the developer and the requirement. This is often what the project pays for getting some new integration to work.

It will often be the projects that will pay for the specific development they will need to solve a challenge. Often this can be by hiring external developers to help with the project.

Support of the integration 

Once the integration is delivered, you will need to support it. There can be a large difference in how much each interface requires of support. Some of the factors include:

  • How much the developers thought about the robustness
  • How many different data variants will you receive
  • Stability of the systems involved
  • Changes required on an ongoing basis

It is close to impossible to understand what needs to be changed.

In most cases, this is just a cost the integration team needs to cover.

You can reduce the amount required from integrations by continuing to improve the parts of the integration that fail, reducing the requirement for transport.

Upgrades and migration 

You know when you buy something new that you need to invest time and resources in migrating your existing code to it. You will also need to upgrade the platform if you manage it.

For SAP Cloud Integration, upgrades are not something you need to worry about. You can test each upgrade to see if your code still runs. This is recommended, especially if you use APIs that depend on other areas.

Migration to and from a platform takes a lot of effort. We focus on helping customers migrate from SAP PI/PO to SAP Cloud Integration. You can see our migration estimator here and understand what this will cost you.

Governance 

Normal governance would be a part of the development or support process. I do think it is one of the areas where developers are spending a good portion of their time. This is about creating documents of changes that happen during the development process. It also depends on the requirements in your organization for the changes.

The governance is also distributed to different teams to ensure they can manage the full setup of the documents needed.

With Figaf DevOps Tool we can automate the governance process to make it much easier for users to work on the integration.

Team

The team will have a huge impact on the pricing. It is best to have a good consistent core of internal developers.

If you have extra loads like specific projects or migration efforts, then it makes sense to get outside help to upgrade the core of the system. This can be from you favorite System Integration or freelance developers.

You should automate as much as possible, so developers are not spending time on useless activity that is not providing value.

So, what’s the real cost of a SAP Integration?

It depends on a host of factors, including the above and the size and complexity of your integration.

I have a client that I support 3 times a year otherwise everything runs smoothly, whereas others need constant support.

At Figaf, we help organizations to bring down the cost of all the routine tasks, so it becomes a lot easier for them to access the content.

More readings 

Check out the Forrest calculation of the price for running SAP Integration Suite compared to other options. Just as with this one, there are a lot of factors to contain in managing your SAP Integration. They have tried to give a good estimate on some of the values. But as always for marketing, it makes sense to multiply the values a few times. I’m not sure why they add such a high value to the DevOps part of the tooling.

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