Recently, I encountered an interesting project with an integration scenario, which I know is possible but I have not seen it in practice.
The situation is as follow: A company with PI wants to integrate with its trading partners, all of whom happen to have SAP ECC systems. The integration at the partners is to be done with ABAP proxies. The original proposal is to have PI installed at the partners’ locations. This allows the proxies to be generated on the ECC systems from the PI’s ESR and allows the integration to be done with PI-to-PI using the XI protocol. However, this proves to be costly, as each partner will have to obtain a PI license. (This is good for SAP, but not so good for the partners.) The additional expense prevented the project from going forward.
As a result, the company requires that the PI system will be able to integrate with the partners’ ECC systems without the partners having to have PI in their landscape. This presents the following obstacles:
- How to generate the ABAP proxies at the partners’ ECC systems without an ESR of a PI system in the landscape?
- Can messages be sent from the ECC systems to the company’s PI system through the public internet and the company’s firewall?
As we all know, XI protocol is based on HTTP/S. Therefore, there should be no problems of sending messages from the partners to the company, as almost all companies allow HTTP traffic to go out to the public internet. But, how about the company’s firewall setup to allow the internet messages to come in? How about the generation of the ABAP proxies when there is no ESR?
A proof-of-concept was done to demonstrate that this is possible. This article in the link below outlines the detailed steps needed to accomplish the integration scenario:
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/f0f4534c-0c3a-2f10-2fae-8db7587cd440
This article describes the process involved in the ABAP proxy generation without the presence of an ESR in partner’s landscape, and it also demonstrates a simplified firewall setup at the company’s landscape for the integration scenario.
