HANA Cloud Integration: Getting Started

HANA Cloud Integration

Introduction

Why on-demand integration:

The growing complexity of customer processes puts a lot of complex requirement on their landscape. In addition to having solutions from various vendors, customer environments now comprise of a combination of on-premise and on-demand solutions. SAP recognizes that it is crucial to provide integration to make such a hybrid solution landscape work. To address this need, SAP delivers a cloud-based integration technology as a managed service (Platform as a service [PaaS]) on top of SAP HANA Cloud to provide out-of-the-box connectivity between on-demand solutions and other SAP on-premise or on-demand solutions. It provides both process and data integration capabilities.

What is HANA Cloud Integration:

HANA Cloud Integration is a collection of tools, environment and platform that you will use to design, develop, build, deploy, run, administer and monitor the integration content.

Additionally, SAP provides a collection of pre-configured content for SAP to SAP integration to provide out-of-the-box connectivity between SAP applications. In order to foster ease of consumption, it is ensured that HANA Cloud Integration uses the same content as PI. This ensures that all your prior investments in PI content (if any) are intact. It also ensures a steep learning curve and lesser time to get the first scenario running.

Extensive process steps are provided for you to design your integration. This includes: content based routing, mapping, encoding, decoding, filtering, enriching, encryption, signing, verifying, decryption and splitter.

Architecture:

HANA Cloud Integration provides a multi-tenant architecture provisioned on an oSGi based implementation. This ensures an autonomous, independent and highly secure environment for each participant. The runtime entity is referred to as a tenant and it comprises of management and worker nodes.

The ESB supports pattern based integration. More patterns are added from time to time.

The modeling environment is based on BPMN 2.0.

Interfaces:

In order to perform these tasks, SAP provides 2 interfaces:

1)      Eclipse based environment meant for the integration developers: here you configure, deploy, administer and monitor your integration flows. You can also use this to create new camel components going forward.

The Eclipse Juno 4.2 release is used for this purpose.

2)      HTML 5 based WebUI meant for an Integration Experts: SAP provides pre-configured content for SAP to SAP integration. All such pre-delivered content can be discovered from the WebUI. The content can directly be the deployed from the WebUI to your runtime. It also allows you to customize some parameters of the pre-configured iflow before it is deployed.

Supported connectivity:

Currently HANA Cloud Integration supports the following connectivity:

• SOAP
• sFTP
• IDoc over SOAP
• SuccessFactor (planned for release in Dec’13). It is a dedicated adapter to integrate with SuccessFactor applications.
• REST (planned)
• OData (planned)

HANA Cloud Integration Flavors:

Currently HANA Cloud Integration can be licensed as:

• Application Edition: i.e. only with the application systems that are currently supported by it.
• Financial Services Network: a very specific usecase meant for exchange of financial information between a financial institute and it’s connected corporate.

In the future, you can however expect HANA Cloud Integration to be available also in Platform Edition.

The SAP Mobile Platform (planned) is also based on HANA Cloud Integration.

The next blog will cover details about the supported Application systems.

Would you like to try this offering? Please contact Meghna Shishodiya for more details.