Results of the global NetWeaver PI Survey 2013 (Part 1 of 2)
As the previous years, the International Focus Group for PI (IFG for PI) performed its annual survey for SAP NetWeaver PI. The survey was scheduled from May till August 2013 and was open for all users and companies using SAP NetWeaver PI, PO or XI as an integration platform. The survey contained 21 general questions and 9 questions about this year’s focus topic B2B and EDI.
Many thanks to all of the 539 participants from over 20 different user groups that replied to our survey! With your help the number of participants more than doubled compared to last year.
The results are published in two separate blogs. This first one covers the general questions which have remained the same as in the previous years. The second blog Results of the global NetWeaver PI Survey 2013 (Part 2 of 2) shows the results of the focus topic B2B and EDI. The complete survey results are forwarded to all participants who have included their email address in the survey registration.
Survey Results
The following section shows an extract of the results.
Number of participants: 539
Participants per user group:
Used productive release (XI, PI, PO):
A very interesting development is here the significant drop of release 7.0. The latest PI and PO releases have already gained a good implementation rate, while PI 7.11 has still the largest market share.
Plans for release upgrade:
Number of interfaces (counting point-to-point connections):
Evaluation of system performance:
Good news is that the very positive feedback and trend in regards to system performance was also confirmed in 2013.
Indication whether monitoring is still a major pain point:
Despite SAP’s investments in the local and central PI monitoring (NWA, Solution Manager) monitoring still remains a major pain point.
Plans to use central PI monitoring on SAP Solution Manager:
A very interesting outcome of the survey is that the implementation rate of the central PI monitoring via SAP Solution Manager has only reached 15% so far, but 40% have contrete implementation plans.
Pain points in comparison to 2011 and 2012:
The general question regards to pain points confirms that performance and stability is no critical issue for most of the companies, while end-to-end monitoring remains at a constantly high level. To address this topic, the IFG plans to offer additional webinars for local and central PI monitoring to spread the knowledge about current and upcoming monitoring functionality within the user community. Apart from that we also plan to organize feedback sessions in some local user groups to have detailed discussions with the SAP product development about concrete functional requirements in this area.
Stay tuned for part two of the survey results to be published in November.
Is there any plan to improve the monitoring since it is the top issue in PI/PO?
Thanks.
For the German user group DSAG, we plan to schedule a workshop with SAP in Q1/2014 to discuss the current functionality provided by SAP and collect concrete functional improvements. We also want to motivate other SAP user groups to collect requirements, so that we could consolidate the results by end of Q1/2014.
It will have to be discussed with SAP during this process whether the implementation of the collected features will be part of the next cycle of the SAP Customer Connection Program for PI or provided in another way.
If you have already concrete functional requirements, your input would be very valuable to us.
Hi Kok Chuan,
we actually have done a lot in the last couple of years in improving monitoring and operation of PI, and still investing. Let me just name some of the new developments:
- we have shipped a central technical monitoring cockpit/dashboard in Solution Manager
- we have improved the monitoring between PI and BPM on Process Orchestration
- we have just recently shipped an end-to-end monitoring, the so called Message Flow Monitor (MFM), with Solution Manager 7.1 SP10
- we have improved the monitoring of b2b scenarios including technical and functional ack status, related messages, ack report, display original EDI message, etc, for both local monitoring and as part of MFM
- we have shipped a new message based alerting on java only with central alert inbox in Solution Manager
As you can see from the results, only 15% of the customers participating in the survey do use central monitoring in Solution Manager although I would say that we have addressed some of the major pain points such as a central dashboard already with the current Solution Manager portfolio. So, I would guess that the bad rating of the monitoring capabilities of PI is rather due to low adoption of Solution Manager.
Nevertheless, we are very much interested in feedback about our monitoring tools. So, Holger has planned to get further details from the customers using Solution Manager and to share this feedback with us.
Thanks
Alex