Introducing SAP’s new People Integration OnDemand group

A recent set of new job offerings for the People Integration OnDemand group in Bangalore reveals some interesting pieces of information about SAP’s plans regarding its Integration OnDemand offering.

The six open positions for this group are

• Quality Specialist
• Developer-HCM
• Senior Quality Specialist/Quality Expert
• Developer-NW PI/ Data Services(Java)
• Senior Developer-HCM
• Developer-Web Java

These offerings range from OnPremise developers (“Senior Developer-HCM”) to OnDemand Developers (“Senior Developer-NW PI /Java”)

All these offerings contain the same information regarding their purpose and objectives.  Let’s take a closer look at this common description

People Integration OnDemand group will to focus on prepackaged integration solutions for People Pillar within SAP Cloud portfolio of applications namely Business Execution (BizX) and Employee Central including Payroll using SAP HANA Cloud Integration and Boomi as a middleware platforms.

People Integration OnDemand group’s charter is to accelerate and address the market competition on integration for Employee Central with Cloud Payroll by building generic connectors as well as prepackaged integrations to SAP On-Premise as well as with 3rd party benefits, payrolls, taxes & payment services etc. The group will also partner with key vendors in each of the categories to enhance the coverage of integration options available for the customer. Team will develop integration content using Dell Boomi and HANA Cloud Integration and will actively collaborate with technology teams working HANA Cloud Integration.

Business Execution (BizX) refers to software as a service offering from Successfactors namely Learning Management, Recruiting, Compensation Management, Performance Management and Talent Management. IDC’s Integrated Talent Management MarketScape ranked SuccessFactors as a leader in these six key areas: Talent Management, Recruiting, Learning, Performance, Compensation and Social Technology. Employee Central is the enterprise-grade Core HR solution from SuccessFactors that includes Cloud Payroll solution.

People Integration OnDemand group is part of overall Cloud Integration OnDemand group with SAP Cloud Organization that is focused on provided integration solutions to Cloud Application pillars namely Customer, People and Money.

POV:

• It looks like SAP is bringing all its cloud integration efforts into one group: the Cloud Integration OnDemand group. My assumption is that this group will be based in Bangalore. This centralization should allow SAP to reuse its experience as it ramps-up its efforts in this area.
• These job offers are all for the “People Integration OnDemand Group”. The other “Cloud Application pillars” are described as Customer and People. Usually, descriptions of SAP’s cloud efforts also include suppliers.  So the absence of Ariba-associated integration is a bit strange.  The current Ariba RDS package is based on an OnPremise NetWeaver PI installation and my assumption that the cloud-based integration  for Ariba will take longer than the other offers.
• There is no mention of using this platform for cloud-based integration for Business ByDesign.
• I expect job offerings for the other “pillars” Customer and Money to surface later this year.
• This team is distinct from the broader HANA Cloud Integration team.  The job description for a senior developer for this group stresses a “focus on Integration content (mapping, routing, integration flows) development in Hana Cloud Integration and Boomi. Contributor to SAP Integration OnDemand Developer Group.”. This People Integration OnDemand team will focus on specific HCM-related content.
• Since the release date of the some of the associated integration packages for recruiting process was in March, I have no idea if this new team will focus on future enhancements of these initial efforts or new packages for other related functional areas.
• I knew that Boomi was originally planned as the being part of the HCM-related integration efforts but I was surprised to see that Boomi-related activities will be performed by SAP itself rather than farming out this work to other integration partners.  This trend is also implied by the job offering for the “Developer-Web Java “:

As developer (f/m) you will develop Web Application for configuration of pre-packaged Integration content development in Boomi and Hana Cloud Integration

As developer (f/m) you will also develop integration content on Boomi, with Groovy and Javascript as well as on HANA Cloud Integration.