HCI Infoday 2016 – what YOU really MISSED!

21 June 2016, again we had a rockin’ meeting @SAP HQ Walldorf. Udo Paltzer and his team organized the HCI Infoday for partners and customers. It’s the perfect event to meet your fellows and share some knowledge, aside having a great time. The event was loaded with people, even a waiting list was there, so for next time, be on time with your registration!

So what you missed…

This year, all presenters had 15 minutes to do their thing, I liked this approach, keeping all attendees and myself 😆 awake for the whole day!

Updates on HCI

• Named from HCI to SAP HANA® Cloud Platform, integration service
• Lowers cost, increases speed, and enhances simplicity for our customers
• Accelerated integration through HCI content packages
• Integration platform of choice for all new SuccessFactors customers
• 7 available subscription models
• Complementary to SAP Process Orchestration
• Certification scenario for PI Content and Adapter available
• Choose your tools: Eclipse and/or WEB UI

Our story

Together with our customer ENECO respresented bij Marco Verhoef, my colleagues Guido Koopmann and Igor Mitrovic, presented our business case on the financial aspect s of HCI. Conclusion on this case, is that we realized between 50% to 70% off Annual TCO:

• No more annual server costs (Managed Services)
• No more additional costs for upgrades and patches
• SAP HCI runs in the data centers of SAP, with all the benefits like
  • Technical maintenance
  • Centralized system Monitoring by SAP

Summary

HCI is a promising platform, but there is still some work to do. Hereby a list of likes and missing things from all presenters:

Likes

* Flexible Pipeline, very transparent processing steps

* Deployment Options (externalized parameters)

* Open Standards Based & Modern Architecture (Apache Camel, Karaf)

* Reusability Options (ESR PI Interfaces & Mappings)

* No costs for hardware and installation

* Multi-tenant and scalable architecture

* Automated failover

* Rolling software updates

* Pre-delivered integration content that is simple to download and deploy

* Development and monitoring through either Web UI environment or Eclipse

* Detailed integration guides available on SAP Service Marketplace

* Shorter project timescales

* Restarting messages from HCI Message Monitor

Missing

* Prepackaged b2b adapters

* Transport mechanism

* Optimized monitoring

* Some more adapters like FTP, JDBC, RFC

* Interface Design Governance of PI

* Switch between WebUI <-> Eclipse, still some problems

* Security Concept is extremely tough (SFTP connectivity has to be requested one by one)

* Quarterly updates, information about changes could be better

* Customers only get two HCI tenants (Test and Production)

* Tools to help you create your own WSDLs and XSDsB2B capabilities, like handling with interchange numbers of transactions

* Have an option to publish Integration Package directly to the Content Catalog

* Import of XSLT mapping through Web UI, XSLT mapping test in UI

* In comparison to PI/PO, graphical mapping in HCI is limited – e.g. display queue, copy payload from clipboard…

At last, Udo and team, thanks for organizing, all arrangements where perfectly done!

If you are interested in the presentations, click here & for us in the meanwhile 😎 :