Summarizing Key Sessions: A SAP TechEd Online Personal Experience (Part Two)

From a couch in India, sipping some masala chai, connected to the world wide web, I continue summarizing my online SAP TechEd Las Vegas experience around Process Orchestration, Cloud Integration, HANA and Mobility.

For who have missed the Part One of this series, click here.

Architecture and Technology in SAP HANA

1. HANA brings the value of Real time business insights ex. Customer insights, Product/Service Insights, Operations Insight

2. HANA is the product of the combination of latest Hardware innovations along with SAP’s innovative Software.

3. Multiple offerings – SAP HANA platform edition & SAP HANA enterprise edition plus additional SAP HANA solutions

4. Challenges of In-Memory computing is around Parallelism and Data locality. The DRAM is 100K times faster than the disk yet the DRAM access is still 4-60 times slower than on-chip caches.

5. Currently HANA is focused on real time operational analytics. The SAP strategy is to enhance the existing platform to deliver a SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA

6. In case of SAP Netweaver BW, powered by HANA, the HANA DB becomes the primary persistance of ABAP application server. All objects and BW loading procedures are accelerated by in-memory technology.

7. From a use case POV, HANA fits both ABAP and Non ABAP scenarios.

8. The future vision is to have a one DB platform for the whole landscape, that platform being HANA

Business Rules and Decision Service Management with SAP Software

1. Decisions are high change components. Ex. Regulations and policies change, consumer behaviour changes, market changes etc

2. Separating processes and decisions adds agility

3. A process definition is a stable components while the decision services are high change components.

4. SAP offers multiple solutions – NW Decision Service Management (ABAP), NW Business Rule Management (JAVA) and Business rules on SAP HANA

5. The SAP Netweaver Decision Service Management helps in rapid deployment with no/minimum IT involvement, no downtime.

6. A functional/business expert can be assigned the responsibility to manage the decision service by decoupling it from the overall process

7. Netweaver BRM provides tools for rules authoring, has a rules repository and a rule engine at its core.

8. Decision table, flow rules, text rules are supported in BRM

A Deep-Dive into the New Features in SAP NetWeaver Process Integration

1. Java only deployment option of SAP Netweaver PI

2. Gartner says, SAP a leader in the application infrastructure magic quadrant

3. Substantial reduction of TCO and supports sustainable IT

4. 1 hr install time and 90 sec restart time

5. SAP Process Orchestration supports common deployment of AEX, BPM and BRM on a single system, supports model driven development and additionally provides downloadable Enterprise integration patterns

6. Enterprise integration patterns becomes templates which can be further enhanced.

7. Single IDE – Integration flows and ESR within Eclipse

8. In 7.31 SP4, ESR tooling gets enhanced in Eclipse ex. complete mapping functionalities, testing environment, context objects, search functionalities etc

9. In 7.31 SP4, there are new capabilities for Eclipse based integration flows ex. virus scanner, extended receiver determination, CTS+ transport, B2B support etc

10. SAP’s own B2B offering reducing the dependency on third party vendors

11. Enhanced integration with solution manager providing better operational maintenance capability

12. Reuse of channels in iFlows planned in SP6

13. Many planned innovations ex. Integration visibility helping monitor factors like SLAs, Error ratios, volumes, E2E processing times etc

SAP NetWeaver Process Integration and SAP NetWeaver Gateway – When to Use What

1. What is NW Gateway? – It is a technology that provides a simple way to connect devices, environments and platforms to SAP software based on market standards..

2. Gateway offers connectivity to SAP backend by leveraging REST services and OData/Atom protocols

3. It is a development framework that supports Light weight consumption and quick turn around of E2E solution

4. REST adapter (partner) is available for REST enabled interface in PI

5. In simple terms, for integrating with mobile devices in a RESTful manner with backend being SAP, go for NW Gateway while for ESB based requirements, use SAP PI.

Hope this summary was insightful. Enjoy the SAP TechEd Online experience!