Key Integration Principles for the Intelligent Enterprise
SAP's integration strategy is based on four key principles:

Out-of-the-box integration
- Prepackaged content supporting integration of the end-to-end business processes in SAP's intelligent suite (Lead to Cash, Design to Operate, Source to Pay, and Recruit to Retire)
- Prebuilt integration content can be found in SAP Process Navigator and the SAP Business Accelerator Hub
- The Cloud Integration Automation Service (CIAS) enables easy deployment of supported SAP Best Practices integration scenarios.
Open integration
- SAP is open for any third-party integration and custom extensions that leverage public APIs.
- An Application Programming Interface (API) is a messenger that allows two applications to talk to each other. An API delivers a request from one system to another, then returns a response. They facilitate communication between systems by selectively exposing certain functionalities, allowing different applications, websites, or devices to communicate with each other.
- SAP provides prebuilt connectors for 160+ third-party applications with Open Connectors in the SAP Integration Suite.
Holistic integration
- SAP provides a holistic integration technology portfolio that covers all flavors of integration required in cloud and hybrid landscapes.
- With SAP Integration Suite, SAP supports all types of integration use cases, ranging from process, data, user, and IoT, to analytics-centric integration.
- The Integration Solution Advisory Methodology helps enterprise architects shape the integration strategy for their organizations, which can include integration technologies from SAP and third parties.
AI-driven integration
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning are used to simplify the development of integration scenarios.
- For example, the Integration Advisor capability 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.