PI at Sapphire and Features of PI 7.31 SP 04

I am just back from Sapphire 2012, Orlando with all the discussions and sessions revolving around the future of PI and where we are heading with the product. Although Sapphire was all about HANA, Cloud and Mobility, on-premise products like PI made some space for discussions.

It was a pleasure meeting Udo Paltzer and Eduardo Chiocconi who shared their opinion about where we are heading with PI. I also shared some good time with Daniel Graversen. Here is the brief overview of the learnings.

PI Current Statistics

• PI 7.31 is now in GA since the Sapphire. During the ramp-up, 6 customers went live with the combined Process Orchestration product.
• There are currently 4461 customers using PI in their production environment. 180 new production customers are being added every quarter. This would mean an average of 2-3 go-lives every working day.
• With the companies concentrating more and more on Sustainability drive, the new PI Java only version is claiming a 60% reduction in the energy consumption.
• SP04 of PI 7.31 will be available by end of June with some interesting additional features. More about it in section below.

Questionnaire

A lot of questions were answered during the sessions and discussions. Here are a few:

Q: Is SAP planning to provide a tool for migration of ccBPM scenarios from dual-stack to Java-only stack?

A: As expected, the answer was No. However, by the end of year, guidelines and recommendation will be provided for the migration.

Q: How will the B2B add-on affect the partners offering like Seeburger? With the upgrade to newer versions of PI, does SAP recommend to move to B2B add-ons?

A: If you have already invested on Seeburger, you should stick with it as these adapters will still be supported in future versions. As there is an additional license required for the add-ons, it wouldn’t be a cost-effective solution to move to new adapters.

Q: What is the roadmap for PI in cloud.

A: PI itself won’t be moved to cloud solution. As the underlying architecture for PI was based for on-premise product, moving the same architecture to cloud wouldn’t be an efficient integration solution. I have lot more to talk about this. Wait for the next blog 😉

Features of PI 7.31 SP 04

SP 04 of 7.1 is coming up with some interesting features. I can provide only a small list for now:

• Virus scan at inbound and outbound PI interfaces. (Update: Available from SP 02 as per Release Notes)
• Virus scan option for Integration Flows.
• Special role for maintaining OS commands in file communication channel. This way every developer won’t be able to create and execute command line programs. (Update: Available from SP 02 as per Release Notes)
• Configuration within the service interface to mark it for sensitive data.
• Excel based import and export of Value mappings. (Update: Available from SP 01 as per Release Notes)
• Import of RFCs and Idocs on the eclipse based development environment.

Planned Features

• A monitor similar to Seeburger Message Tracking to monitor B2B messages.
• Options of monitoring B2B messages with highest error ratio.
  

Conclusion

SAP will continue to invest on PI as their on-premise solution. PI is getting popular in the integration arena day by day and SAP is expecting a stronger positioning of PI in upcoming Forrester’s “Comprehensive Integration Solution” chart. The cloud based integration solution is yet to come but people are already talking about it.

I forgot one important observation

Not all ESBs can integrate! 😀