I attended the SAP Cloud Platform Integration(HCI) day this week.
I created a video around the topic where I’m going deeper into the content that I can describe here.
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There is a problem with the name of the product. There is no official abbreviation of it so during the presentation it was mentioned as HCI, SCP Integration and CPI. CPI is the most logical but is used by another product. The lack will mean it becomes more difficult to find people with the correct skillsets because there is so many different solutions. So until somebody find an official abbreviation I’ll be using HCI.
There was a section with the news highlights of HCI where Udo Paltzer was presenting some new.
· Self service key store
· JMS Queues internally to decouple async message. It is on the enterprise version.
· 99.99% uptime on a monthly basis. Somebody was mentioning that contract giving SAP access to hours of service window if it was planned.
· Web UI was the way forward, Eclipse would be depreciated.
· A customer regression testing solution. Since it is something I’m quite interested in with my tool for doing the same on SAP PI/PO. Check out https://figaf.com/irt to learn about the generic solution to test SAP PI/PO.
Customer regression testing is a service SAP provides where a customer can submit an iFlow together with in and out test messages. SAP would then make a test mock of the service and run the tests on it.
SAP will then run those mock iFlows in their own system before the code is released for customers and if there are any errors they would ensure that they do not break any functionality. This is a service you need to buy at SAP and will only cover your most critical or complex scenarios. And if your iFlow changes you will need to submit new tests. It will be a service you will see on the price list.
SAP was also presenting some of their services that used the HCI. There was a Ariba Connector hub something which enabled you to onboard vendors or suppliers fairly easy. Here the user was guided thru a wizard about the integration. There was some confusion where it fitted in but they were just creating iflow based on the configuration. There was also a Farma net demo where they also created iFlows in the background using some internal APIs for HCI. The API will be public this fall.
I was at a workshop last summer in Waldorf where we were looking for better ways to improve the integration experience. One of the ideas was this one click or wizard approach to create integrations.
There was also a Successfactor and eDocuments presentations. From them it was clear to see that these services gave companies an approach to SAP HCI and then they would get to know the product. And hopefully start moving more integrations to it. The hot example is the Spanish SII document that will start 1 july 2017. Last weeks there was 80 productive instances running now there was 280. So it was a big driver for getting HCI to customers.
There was 9 partner presentations of different levels of depth and relevance to HCI.
Some of the takeways I got from Morten Wittrock from KMD was that it would be beneficial to learn about the Camel framework and groovy scripts because it enabled you to leverage the full platform.
ProXcellence was talking about if customers was really ready for the cloud. It was something to buy HCI but not all organizations was able to leverage it together with the changed capabilities of the cloud infrastructure. HCI was quite simple but you sometimes needed to get some more experienced developers onboard because there were limitations to what business uses knew about certificates and the integration.
Do check out video attached to this post.