I spent this week in Berlin at TechEd, and as usual there’s a lot to catch up on.
If you weren’t there, SAP has published the TechEd Innovation News Guide. It’s the quickest way to see what was announced in your own area, so I’d recommend skimming it, even if you only read the integration part.
Read the SAP TechEd 2026 Innovation News Guide
For me, the best part of TechEd is still the people. I had a lot of good talks with customers, partners and old friends from the integration community. TechEd isn’t really the place for roadmaps anymore, but the conversations make it worth the trip.
A few things stood out. AI was everywhere, from agents that write and run code to the new Enterprise AI Gateway on Integration Suite. The AI Gateway is a strong option if you need better governance over how your company uses LLMs, but not everyone needs it yet. I also enjoyed the customer sessions, including a large PI/PO migration and a PI/PO-to-B2B project at a steel company. They show that migration is still very much happening. And I noticed how many consultancies have built their own migration tools. That’s a good sign for the market, and it’s also why we keep Figaf easy to try without being locked into one partner.
You can also see my full perspective in this blog post.
SAP Enterprise AI Gateway
For integration, one of the big pieces of news is SAP Enterprise AI Gateway. It builds on top of Integration Suite and should give users more robustness when working with AI tools. It was in the keynote, and it did sound interesting.
I hope to see more of it soon and understand what it really is. I could imagine it being something like an MCP server on Integration Suite that agents can use when they want to look up data, where you add the policies for what can be looked up. I can see it providing value, but it’s probably something you need to explore before you understand how to use it.
Hopefully it comes with a lot of good templates that users can add easily.
Another thing that sounded interesting was generating message mappings from input and output content. Being able to give it the content that comes in and what should come out, and get a mapping back, could save a lot of time.
There are a lot of other integration notes in the guide too, so check it out.
Read the SAP TechEd 2026 Innovation News Guide
Agents are just the newest integration consumer
I read this great article by Thorsten Lyby, co-founder of Oruga, about day one at TechEd in Berlin. The theme was the agentic enterprise, and Thorsten does a good job of explaining what that actually means for those of us in integration.
SAP describes five new integration patterns: system to agent, agent to agent, agent to system, data to context, and prompt to LLM. Its answer to the guardrail question is a gateway for each one. Together they make up the SAP Enterprise AI Gateway I mentioned above. So we now have a better picture of what it is: governing agents the same way we’ve always governed APIs.
What I like is that Thorsten also points out what’s still missing. Who owns the contract when the agent on the other end belongs to a vendor? How do you trace an agent’s decisions end to end? And do you even know which MCP servers are already talking to your systems? Shadow IT has a new name: shadow MCP.
His conclusion is one I agree with. Agents won’t replace integration. They’re its newest and chattiest consumer, and someone still has to do the plumbing.
Now I’ll take some time to rest and digest everything I took in at TechEd. If you were there too, I’d love to hear what stood out for you. Send me a message on LinkedIn.
