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The new Roadmap for SAP PI/PO and SAP CPI Suite

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At DSAG (German-speaking user Group) there was a roadmap session that we could see some points from. This is what happens after SAP updated their support for ECC/Business Suite to 2027 it and implications for other tools. 

I would assume that this is the current working model and we will see more updates on this later. There will come an official roadmap later, once everything has been cleared. 

I created a video with some more information.

Biggest takeaways were:

  • PI 7.5 will be the last release but support extended some years until 2027.   
  • So now a new version that we got the impression the last years. 
  • There will be an on-prem version of SAP CPI and API management you can run on your own hardware. With a monitor and development tool. 

I really love this. It will have a lot of benefits to SAP customers. 

SAP PI

Java 8 has been extended support for longer by oracle. So there is no reason to upgrade to Java 11 and create a new version of NetWeaver Java. It would be costly for SAP to upgrade and also for customers so it makes a lot of sense. It is both PI but also all the other applications on the suite.

It would also be a stretch to get customers to move to the next NetWeaver release within 2 years, now have customers that have not upgraded for 10 years. 

I don’t know what the investments will be into PI/PO with this extended support. I would assume they free some capital for not having to perform the upgrade. 

SAP CPI

SAP CPI is the path forward and where customers should move. 

Removing PI from the Netweaver stack makes a lot of sense. It was probably 6 months behind cloud deployment and was costly to implement. I would assume there is quite a bit of work to port the framework to use the Netweaver stack compared to the cloud. 

That was the main reason we dropped running our Figaf tool on Netweaver stack. 

My assumptions of this: 

  • I would assume that you need to upgrade every 1-3 months to get support or even be able to use the tool. I expect that SAP does not want customers running 5-year-old versions of CPI. So you need to be able to test and upgrade much more often.
  • If SAP did not have the dependency for Netweaver then CPI can be upgraded to Java 11 and Camel 3.0. 
  • If SAP will allow users to have an on-prem version of the CPI then it means that there will not be a change to WebIDE to develop CPI.

Learn more

If you want to learn more about SAP CPI we have created a course that helps you understand how you can develop SAP CPI, so you can get started faster. On the side you can also find our free version of the course.

If you want to develop and manage SAP CPI better try the Figaf IRT. It enables you to manage, govern, test and document SAP CPI and API management much simpler.

Change Management can be simple

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In the old-time, you had the SAP R3 ABAP system. There it was a pretty good tool to do change management. There was a limited number of objects that you could change and they could all be managed by one way of handling transports. In the new world, it is a lot more complicated.

Now the landscape is completely different. You have many different services that you need to find a way to manage. And if you start using SAP cloud solutions many of them have their own way of handling transports.

I have created a video to show, how I see the concept in some more details.

You have two options for Change Management: A generic approach or a specialized approach for your most important systems.

Generic Change management

No matter what you need to develop change, everything is handled in the same way. Then all developers know how to do change management for everything. It will speed up making it possible for other developers to handle the tooling.

The downside is that you will need to make a process that can encompass all systems. You will, therefore, get to little information or spend to much time creating the documents that you need for your project.

You may also miss an important part, and that is the ability to like changes both ways

Tool specific change management

If you have a lot of development or highly critical tools. It does make sense to have a better way to handle it.

When we are working on our Java application for the Figaf tool. We use Jira to create tickets in, Developers will then use this ticket number for all commits to a given ticket. Changes to our unit tests are also linked with the ticket. That is allowing us to trace all changes back to a ticket. That is a hyper-specialized tool to make change management for just one case. It can then be bundled with Jenkins to make build and test automation.

This type of specialization of your change management saves you time for your development. Because developers don’t need to note all the different places they are making modifications. It is handled automatically by the tool and captured as a part of the change.

Sure it will cost you more to buy or create an environment. It will cost both money, time and effort to get it working. Hopefully, this investment will be returned with better documentation, easier change management and faster delivery of code.

If you are using SAP Integrations products like SAP PI/PO, CPI or API mgt then we have a tool that will allow you to optimize your delivery process. Check the tools at https://figaf.com/IRT there are even free versions that allow you to get started.

With our approach we will handle all the tool-specific requirements in our application and then let your original system containing all organizational data.

Download Figaf IRT

If you want to see how our tool works to make DevOps possible check this video

SAP PI Migration webinar

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So, on January 15. 2018 I held a webinar I webinar about SAP PI Migration. In the webinar, I talked about my 7 step plan for migration of SAP PI to a single stack. The 7 steps look as following:

  • Goals
  • Current integrations
  • Pattern mappings
  • Resource consumption
  • Migration phases
  • Development
  • Testing

The plan covers an initial assessment on your landscape and an idea of where you want to move your landscape.

Here you can watch the replay on the webinar:

If you want to know more you can also take a look at the blog post 7 steps PI PO migration, which was published on September 25., 2017.

You can also take a look at the slideshow: SAP PI/PO migrations – How to save time and lower risk on your projects:


Lastly, when you are interested in migration, you might want to take a look at this:

  • Seeburger Migration Tool The Figaf Seeburger Migration Tool (SMT) allows you to migrate your existing Seeburger BIC solution to a native B2B Add-on solution.
    It helps update your message mappings to use the new schemas created with the B2B Add-on. It makes your migration process a lot
    faster and have a reduced risk

New whitepaper: How to create your SAP integration in 2019

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So, November 14. 2018, I wrote a blog post, The future of SAP Integration PI, CPI and how to prepare your self, about a webinar, where I talked about the key takeaways from SAP Teched and how to implement things based on. There is a lot of interest in the topic because it is new ground for a lot of customers and consultants. You will need to think about how you are using SAP XI/PI/PO and how you migrate/upgrade. The big new thing that you have probably not been able to avoid is how to use SAP Cloud Integration (CPI/HCI), and now all the extra services.

Now, I am happy to announce that I created a whitepaper about my thinking about SAP Integration in 2019:


You can download it from the Slideshare page.

And why is this stuff important? It is so, because already today you are working with integration, and you´ll probably have to work with a lot of new integration projects in 2019.

As always in something like this, there are functions that changes and you need to make it work in a different way. It is also difficult to capture all requirements for all scenarios so as always it depends on your strategy what to do.

In other words, if you have to be ready for all the new challenges, you have to understand where you are going, the current state of the SAP PI roadmap and how to make integration in a faster way. Once again, I would like you to pay attention to Figaf´s Integration Regression Tool, which supports the full lifecycle of integration. It is a requirement for how you are going to deal with integration.

If you like this, please share or leave a comment.

Optimize your SAP PI/CPI development

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Your SAP Integration development is not all about delivering interfaces fast. It is also about making sure that you do the proper Change Management for the interfaces. In all organizations, integration is playing a key role in the future of the organization. If you have SAP PI/PO or Cloud Platform Integration (CPI), then you probably have quite a number of projects to look at. It is difficult to get time to architecture, development, and QA because there are too many projects going on.

My presentation is built on a process like the following steps. And it is the same if you are using agile or waterfall. Sure there may be a difference in the step size, duration, and naming. But they will always be there. It is the following

  • Scoping
  • Development
  • Testing
  • Document
  • Transport
  • Validation
  • Go live
  • Support

 

The Figaf IRT tool allows optimize and automize the different steps in the process, so you don’t have to have all the manual paper tasks to fill in. You will get a much greater visibility in to what is developed of your SAP PI/CPI landscape. And then you are going to get just one landscape for handling all your developments since IRT support both PI/CPI in one common landscape.

In the webinar, I also get to show off the new data anonymization process that allows you to anonymize data, so you can do a good test with your HR data anyway.

You can watch the replay here. We did have some technical issues and the video did not turn out correct. So I had to create a new version of the video. I guess it is better because of the rehearsal.

You can start using Figaf IRT for free. We have a free package that allows you to test forever.

Yes I want to test SAP PI/CPI