Not too long ago, there were many questions/concerns ranging from BPM roadmap (there is ccBPM, Netweaver BPM and SAP products like ECC, CRM etc themselves are Business Process Automation solutions) to the PI product future. With PI 7.3, SAP has put these concerns to rest, now that we realize that the road ahead is single stack ESB and the definitive roadmap for BPM is Netweaver BPM with built-in support for BPMN and Rules.
All the views provided here are my personal opinions and based out of my experience with PI and do not necessarily reflect my employer’s. Please treat the inputs in this blog as just opinions and you should definitely seek professional expertise and opinion before making your business decisions.
By going leaner with single stack ESB, SAP would definitely gain more market share and the Clients will realize the apparent benefits listed out by SAP like less infrastructural requirements, lower foot print, up to 60% less energy consumption, easy maintenance etc.
In fact, moving to a single platform (in this case, Java) has seemingly more benefits:
- It is often hard for an organization to find people with the same level of expertise to support both platforms (Java and ABAP). From this perspective, server administration complexity would drastically come down with experienced Java platform support resources which mean fewer calls to SAP for support.
- With more and more dual-stack-case scenarios shifting to single stack and almost all deployment options (federated/distributed) being supported on single stack (de-central adapter engines supported from PI 7.3 SP2), SAP PI should now attract the wider and experienced Java developer community. We still did not mention the Eclipse perspectives in NWDS!
- PI developer expertise is now faster to build on a single platform
- Web-based UI in ESB for scenarios around governance and support for BPMN in CE should definitely appeal to the Business user community.
- From 3.0 days, PI always carried a remark that the learning curve is long. For those starting on single stack ESB this would no longer be true.
- Single stack ESB should find more levels of acceptance even in landscapes with less SAP footprint. The fact that Netweaver BPM is also based on single Java Platform should only be more enticing.
There are no upgrade paths available from older releases to single stack ESB. However this definitely would not deter us moving towards Single Stack ESB given the huge set of advantages associated with it. In the interim, avoiding ABAP mappings and restricting usage of adapters based on ABAP should be beneficial for a swift move towards Single stack ESB.
