Introducing Integration Concepts

Integrations are used to connect applications on different platforms to each other for the purpose of sending data and/or adapting processes. For example, a customer may use SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central as their human resources (HR) system of record, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud as their financial system of record. If you want to create employees in Employee Central and have them display as users in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, you need an integration.

An integration package is often a collection of one or more Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs are messengers that carry different types of data, such as worker details, photo, availability, and workforce information. When a group of APIs collectively accomplish a task, like integrating employee data from the HR system of record to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, it's called an integration package.

SAP's integration strategy is based on four key principles:

• Out-of-the-box integration
  • SAP provides prepackaged business process integration content in SAP Signavio Process Navigator.
  • SAP provides the free Cloud Integration Automation Service (CIAS) to make setting up business process integrations from Process Navigator faster and easier with guided workflows
  • SAP and the partner developer ecosystem provide integration packages, APIs, and other resources to connect applications and data in the SAP Business Accelerator Hub.
• Open integration
  • Huge library of predelivered public APIs on the SAP Business Accelerator Hub to support integrations with third party applications and any type of custom extensions.
• Holistic integration
  • The Integration Solution Advisory Methodology is designed to help customers shape their integration strategy and covers all flavors of integration (process, data, UX, Internet of Things (IoT), analytics).
• AI-driven integration
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning are used to simplify the development of integration scenarios. For example, the Integration Advisor capability within the SAP Integration Suite has a crowd-based machine learning approach to enable users to define, maintain, share, and deploy Business-to-Business (B2B) and Application-to-Application (A2A) integration content much faster than building it from scratch.