SAP C4C integration with ERP/CRM: an SAP HCI overview
What is HCI
SAP HANA Cloud Integration is a platform hosted in the SAP HANA Cloud (PaaS – Platform as a Service). It facilitates the integration of business processes spanning different companies, organizations, or departments within an organization. It supports end-to-end process integration across cloud-based and on-premise applications (cloud-cloud and cloud-on-premise integration).
How it works
SAP HANA Cloud Integration provides core runtime for processing, transformation, and routing of messages to be exchanged between the involved participants. Message processing at runtime is performed by a cluster of virtual machines running on SAP HANA Cloud. Here, the platform ensures that data related to different customers connected to SAP HANA Cloud Integration is isolated.
Why HCI is powerful
– Out-of-the-box integration (*): HCI leverages preconfigured integration patterns. SAP provides a predefined set of integration content that covers most of the integration needs for a particular scenario. Customers can use the predefined integration content to implement their integration scenarios with less time and effort, and no integration skills are needed.
– Out-of-the-box connectivity support (IDoc, SFTP, SOAP/HTTPS)
– Security features such as content encryption and certificate-based communication
(*) only for the following scenario:
– SAP’s Cloud for Customer application to on-premise SAP CRM / SAP ERP
– SuccessFactors BizX suite of applications to SAP HCM
How to use
SAP HANA Cloud Integration provides a set of tools and applications that help you to access and manage integration content and to operate SAP HANA Cloud Integartion runtime clusters.
– SAP HCI Spaces: Web-based application that allows you to browse through integration content predefined by SAP.
– Integration Designer tool (Eclipse add-on): allows you to create from scratch or to enhance integration content provided by SAP.
– Integration Operations tool (Eclipse add-on): allows you to perform administrative tasks related to SAP HANA Cloud Integration runtime clusters and to monitor message exchange during runtime.
Features
– Routing: forwards (routes) a message to one or more receivers. SAP HANA Cloud Integration also supports routing that depends on the content of the message (content-based routing).
– Mapping: transforms (maps) sender into receiver data structures.
– Content enricher
– Content filter
– Encoder/decoder (Base64)
– Splitter: breaks down a composite message into multiple individual messages and sends them to a receiver.
Availability
As of today, SAP HANA Cloud Integration is available for customers and partners as an Application Edition, meaning it is part of SAP’s Service Offering and needs to be purchased by the customer together with a dedicated set of SAP Cloud Applications (such as SAP Cloud for Customer, SuccessFactors).