Defining the Integration Strategy

This lesson describes SAP's integration strategy aimed at overcoming the challenges of data growth and fragmentation. It includes a deeper integration of customer interactions, business processes, and technology. The strategy is based on five key aspects: Platform approach, agility, democratization of integration, intelligent lifecycle management, and analytics. It also emphasizes three pillars: Integration Principles, Integration Suite, and Integration Methodology.

Established integration methods are time-consuming and repetitive, and with the dramatic growth in data volumes from users, machines, cloud applications and sources, sensors, and existing on-premise systems, traditional integration tools cannot keep pace.

Ad-hoc approaches such as do-it-yourself integration are not only costly and cumbersome, but also contribute to data fragmentation across multiple cloud and on-premise data silos and applications. Although they were each developed for a different purpose and are necessary for businesses of all sizes. It remains true: the organizational separation of application integration (transforming and transferring data from one application to another in real time) and data integration (moving and combining data from multiple sources in a standardized way) is not sustainable.

Integration today is about opening up an organization's technology landscape to a broader ecosystem of suppliers, consumers, and machines by creating deeper integration between customer interaction, business processes, and technology.

The following is the strategy for successfully integrating business and technology to capitalize on opportunities to collaborate and share digital assets across organizational boundaries in an open and secure way.

Such a function could enable the ultimate sharing economy by establishing a Center of Excellence for Integration (CoE) that allows users to access or request the applications that they need. In turn, developers can focus on the user interfaces of the applications and simply use the standardized integration paths and protocols established within the CoE framework to access data ecosystems. Organizations want to drive innovation and unlock new business opportunities through ubiquitous access to and seamless use of data. Integration is the driving force behind this data utopia.

The five key imperatives for an Integration Center of Excellence must abstract away excessive complexity by avoiding known pitfalls, implementing best practices and taking advantage of integration services for straightforward, secure digital use of data and business logic - while keeping an eye on time and cost to release. This seemingly impossible collection of simultaneous tasks can be achieved if an Integration Center of Excellence is based on the following five key imperatives:

• A Platform Approach.
• Agility and Scalability.
• Integration Democratization.
• Smart Lifecycle Management.
• Analytics and Predictive Intelligence.

A Platform Approach

The recommended approach is a versatile, dynamic, and platform-based integration approach. This enables comprehensive enterprise connectivity and orchestration. A unified platform can cover various integration applications and thus contribute to higher productivity and operational flexibility. In particular, a cloud-based platform that understands business processes and provides a standardized method of connecting all elements can greatly simplify the integration task. Such a standardized platform approach enables companies to respond to integration issues in real time and resolve them effectively.

See: SAP Integration Suite

Agility and Scalability

Organizations must integrate their people, processes, and systems on a central platform that is adaptable to future requirements. This can be achieved with interchangeable integration components and repeatable patterns within a platform framework. A competence center for integration can optimize these processes. APIs are fundamental technology building blocks that make it possible to communicate and introduce requirements and changes at an early stage. They enable dynamic environments with constantly updated connections and can help companies to transform their digital assets into new business models.

• SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology
• SAP Integration Suite

Integration Democratization

The use of reusable integration components that enable non-IT business users, also known as "citizen integrators", to create and update integrations intuitively and without specialized programming knowledge. These tools, which can also be supported by AI, are similar to the user interfaces of smartphones and tablets. They enable users to understand and efficiently handle their data and business logic without having to go through an intensive learning curve, helping to maximize business value.

• Joule
• Low-Code/No-Code tools such as SAP Build and many more.

Smart Lifecycle Management

The enterprise integration strategy must include a plan for managing integration paths and protocols in the Integration Center of Excellence. Documentation of access control, change management processes, enhancement rules, system credentials, and data encryption are important. Application developers often focus on short-term goals, which can compromise governance and data protocols. A center of excellence for integration that operates intelligent lifecycle management is therefore essential for a consistent and adaptable integration strategy.

Analytics and Predictive Intelligence

Analyzing integration activities provides insights into the flow of data between companies, endpoints, and business units. Predictive intelligence can be used to suggest integration patterns based on business data. With a suitable integration platform, companies can better predict how external factors such as pandemics, natural disasters, or changes in the Chinese economy could affect their business.

This lesson describes SAP's integration strategy aimed at overcoming the challenges of data growth and fragmentation. It includes a deeper integration of customer interactions, business processes, and technology. The strategy is based on five key aspects: Platform approach, agility, democratization of integration, intelligent lifecycle management, and analytics. It also emphasizes three pillars: Integration Principles, Integration Suite, and Integration Methodology.

Integration has become the key to intelligent organizations. The holistic integration of business processes, data, business partners, people, and physical resources such as sensors or machines forms the basis for next-generation intelligent enterprises. Integration is a pillar of SAP BTP. The following is an overview of the most important features.

SAP's integration strategy is based on three pillars:

Integration Principles

Predefined integration, open integration, holistic integration and AI-driven integration.

Integration Suite

SAP Integration Suite as a versatile and enterprise-ready hybrid integration platform.

Integration Methodology

SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology as a guide for customers with integration patterns, enabling them to determine their integration strategy for the business.

SAP's comprehensive integration strategy enables the integration of end-to-end business processes that include both the suite's integrated intelligent solutions and partner and third-party solutions.

SAP publishes the description and metadata of open APIs and events for all business unit (LoB) applications and platforms in the SAP Business Accelerator Hub. In addition to harmonized APIs, predefined integration content (so-called integration packs) form an important basis for the integration of applications of the intelligent enterprise.

SAP offers a holistic integration technology portfolio that covers all types of integration. Based on the SAP Integration Suite, SAP supports multiple types of integration applications ranging from process, data, user, and functional integration to analytical integration.

SAP Integration Suite is the solution recommended by SAP to simplify and accelerate integrations for SAP, partner, and third-party integration scenarios.

The development of integration scenarios is accelerated and made more efficient by a variety of features such as:

• Prebuild Integrations.
• Connectors to SAP and non-SAP apps.
• APIs and data graphs.
• Business events.
• Integration Artifacts form partners.
• AI-assisted integrations.
• Automated migrations from PI/PO to Cloud Integration.

The SAP Integration Suite offers the following advantages for hyperscaler environments (public deployment) and for hybrid integrations (private landscapes):

• Integration strategy proposals.
• API-based and event-driven integrations.
• Low-code integration experience.
• Security and governance.
• Service composability.
• Monitoring and operations.

These advantages are realized through integration tools in SAP BTP. These are considered in more detail in the following lessons.

The SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology supports enterprise architects in designing the integration strategy for their organizations. The methodology also provides detailed architectural designs for enterprise-wide challenges.

The four phases are:

• Assess your integration strategy.
• Design your hybrid integration platform.
• Define integration best practices.
• Enablement of empowerment.

All phases are explained in greater detail in this training.

The event-driven architecture is introduced to enable more flexibility and real-time business processes. This architecture supports the integration of different systems and applications by using events as triggers for data processing and workflow activities.

An event is a significant change of state notification events or data events can be sent from the event source to inform about the change. A message with the event description in a coded format is sent through an event broker.

• SAP Business Accelerator Hub
• SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh: Basic Concepts
• SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh

This lesson emphasizes the importance of user and identity management in integration. It is recommended to manage identities centrally to improve the security and management of user access.

The secure operations map covers various security aspects. This guide focuses on user and identity management, authentication, and Single Sign-On (SSO), roles, and authorizations as well as the associated integration and lifecycle aspects.

The end-to-end business processes of the intelligent suite offer integrated solutions that span various individual applications. The integration between the identities and roles of the users in these individual applications and the SSO functionality are essential. The following is a sample scenario.

Identities also have a lifecycle. Therefore, aspects beyond protocols for authentication and authorization such as SAML or OpenIDConnect must also be considered. Data synchronization or replication of identities plays an important role. This is not only required across different applications, but often also across multiple data centers. The following is a blueprint architecture for identity lifecycle management in a complex hybrid environment.

For a consistent identity lifecycle, identities must be centralized in SAP Cloud Identity Services. It offers a standardized interface for identity and authorization management and supports SAP applications, including those with their own user administration. The services manage the entire lifecycle, including deletion, and enable lightweight applications to use tokens instead of user replication. A unique user identifier (UUID) ensures consistent identification of a user across all SAP systems and hybrid scenarios.

• Single Sign-on: SAP Reference Architecture for Identity Access Management
• Identity Lifecycle: SAP Reference Architecture for Identity Access Management - Part 1.

The SAP Cloud Integration Automation Service is presented, which simplifies the integration of SAP Cloud solutions. It offers predefined integration scenarios and automates configuration steps to speed up implementation.

The SAP Cloud Integration Automation Service facilitates the integration of SAP Cloud solutions with other cloud or on-premise systems through a semiautomated workflow for technical configuration.

Integrating multiple SAP solutions is often a complex, manual process that is not standardized and requires multiple experts and different documentation. Without the Cloud Integration Automation Service, incompatibilities, missing authorizations and redundant efforts can occur, as no automated configuration is possible, which makes the process time-consuming.

SAP offers a cloud service for the standardized configuration and automation of integration scenarios. This service enables a standardized user experience and a central access point for setting up SAP integration scenarios. It is integrated into the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and supports a customized, automated configuration that is tailored to the customer's specific system landscape. Customers with an SAP support contract can use this service, which is also open for future enhancements and third-party contributions.

SAP Cloud Integration Automation Service

Various monitoring solutions are described that enable the monitoring and optimization of IT system integration. These tools provide insights into the performance and reliability of integration processes.

Integration is essential for hybrid IT environments with SaaS, PaaS, private cloud services, and on-premise systems. SAP aims to provide fully integrated solutions. To identify problems, integration data is recorded and monitored and alarms are triggered in the event of anomalies. Analysis tools investigate causes based on current and historical data, while automation functions help to resolve them. Problems can lie in the execution of message flows, interface calls, performance, and throughput. SAP's centralized integration monitoring addresses all problems, whether caused by direct interfaces or orchestrated integrations. It covers on-premise, hybrid, and cloud solutions and is supported by SAP Solution Manager, SAP Focused Run, and SAP Cloud ALM for various user groups.

The following is an overview of the monitoring solutions currently offered for End2End monitoring of integration solutions.

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 offers comprehensive monitoring for on-premise solution landscapes, including process orchestration, message flow, and interface/connection monitoring. Process orchestration monitoring enables centralized monitoring of different process integration domains, with self-tests, status checks, and aggregated message monitoring. Extra functions include message search and alerting. Message flow monitoring assembles data fragments into message flow instances based on integration model information. Interface and connection monitoring checks connectivity and data exchange, records exceptions, response times, and interface utilization. It collects data from SAP systems and SAP SaaS and PaaS offerings such as SAP BTP, SAP Ariba, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Sales Cloud.

SAP Focused Run is a specialized version of SAP Solution Manager 7.2 for service providers and customers with high requirements. It offers advanced integration monitoring that monitors extensive interfaces and message flows, compiles end-to-end integration flows and uses predefined scenarios to visualize integration problems. The solution monitors message flows processed by SAP Process Orchestration or SAP Integration Suite and supports interface technologies such as IDocs, Web Service, OData, REST, and RFC. Focused Run covers both on-premise components and SAP-based SaaS products.

The following is an example:

The integration fragments are captured at the finest level so that correlation with end-to-end message flows is possible and messages can be tracked end-to-end. Exceptions can also be managed for almost all SAP Cloud services and on-premise systems.

SAP Cloud ALM is a redesigned, cloud-native operations tool for cloud-based solutions that is available at no additional cost to SAP Cloud subscribers. It provides monitoring for integration and exceptions by monitoring and correlating interface calls and message flows between cloud services and systems and reporting exceptions.

These capabilities are integrated with analytics, alerts, and operational automation to improve the problem resolution process between business and IT. SAP Cloud ALM supports peer-to-peer and SAP Integration Suite interfaces and other orchestration platforms.

SAP Cloud ALM supports a range of SAP products. The following is the current status of supported products.

The following is the entry page for SAP Cloud ALM:

• SAP Solution Manager
• SAP Focused Run
• SAP Cloud ALM for Operations
• Expert Portal