My learning from #HCPHCI Design Council Workshop WDF

Last week (12th-14th Jul) I had an opportunity to participate in an HCI Design council workshop at SAP, Walldorf campus. Oh well, many SAP Cloud solutions are being re-branded (as usual) and so HCI, it is now called as HANA Cloud Platform – Integration services (HCP – Integration Services).

The aim of this workshop to hear from SAP partners and customers on their Integration services journey, what they like, what features/functionality should be improved and new features to be added.

Day 1:

This workshop was kicked off Patrick Kelleher, Program Manager from Technology RIG team. I really liked the idea of how everyone was asked to introduced (we were given a blank sheet and asked to draw some picture/cartoon that could represent one individual, hobby etc). Andreas Quenstedt and his colleagues from product management team talked on ‘ What’s New in SAP HANA Cloud Integration ’, its roadmap , HCI strategy.

How to categorize your integration needs into a few archetypes:

• Process invocation
• Data movement
• User centric consumption
• Thing integration

Post lunch, there was another interesting talk on HCI content management (from Copy/Export to Transport), why transport might be needed. Then, it was our turn to think how would we design “Transport”? We did short of design thinking approach with guiding questions like target persona, their roles, transport granularity, status overview, relationship of SAP update and transport, relation to artifact versioning and how shall the UI look like?

All guests were invited by SAP to an evening at SAP Kalipeh restaurant. In between, I had time to meet some of my friends at SAP Briefing center (Building#1), well, it was very fortunate that Mr. Bill McDermott was also there at same building and luckily I could catch him.

(Dinner together, oh yes, pleasure meeting Jeremy Good )

I personally had no much experience on this service since its not yet part of HCP trial offering. Requesting for a trial (to SAP) will takes weeks, actually months. Later this year, we might have self-subscription for HCI trial. Stay tuned for more updates.

Want to learn and explore about this service?

• Request for a trial here.SAP HANA Cloud Integration – Test and learn more about SAP’s cloud based integration solution
• Follow awesome series of blogs from Paul Todd , Sujit Hemachandran, you tube video
• Current openSAP course :Application Integration Made Simple with SAP HANA Cloud Integration* – Dr. Volker Stiehl and Sindhu Gangadharan
• SCN entry point for SAP Process Orchestration http://scn.sap.com/community/pi-and-soa-middleware
• Check Pre-packaged integration content hub: https://cloudintegration.hana.ondemand.com/#shell/catalog
• Easily exchange data in real time: SAP HANA Cloud Platform – Integration Services: Process Integration

Day 2:

On day 2, it was a customer panel round where everyone talked about their experience on HCP – Integration services.

Later, Mr. Holger Bruchelt presented on API management, how it is helping in today’s digital economy and enabling innovation. A good use case of how Concur & Uber is simplifying business travel.

Want to learn and explore about this service?

• Followblog series  from Chris Whealy >>Highly recommended
• SCN entry point for API Management: SAP APIs and API Management

Later, Paul Todd presented on SAP HCI Security (a sensitive topic 😉 )

Check this recording: SAP Technology RIG Technical Webinar: Security by example for SAP HANA Cloud Integration

Day 3:

Last day was all about HCI- OData provisioning. It’s better to call it as OData provisioning in HCP- Integration services (Beta).

Don’t confuse with OData provisioning in HCP. Both are different and their own purpose. We really need some unique name to identify either one.

If you have worked with SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 then you can relate this OData provisioning (HCP-Integration services) with Integration gateway. The main objective of this offering is to convert non-SAP (even SAP as well) data sources into OData and most important mash-up among all data sources.

At the moment, its not GA. It supports OData operations like: CRUD, Query, Import functions. You can execute OData Queries like $select, $count, $top, $skip, $filter, $orderby

We had an exceise on a scenario where a company wants to create a Fiori app to access and display employee data coming from SuccessFactors (SOAP service). This SOAP service has to convert into OData service.

Note: Make sure to use correct artifact name in generated OData service since its case-sensitive.

https://<<tenantHost>>/gw/odata/SAP/EMPLOYEESJK3;v=1/NewOperationSet

Want to learn and explore about this offering?

• Official documentation: SAP HANA Cloud Integration (Internal, SAP HCI OEM)
• Midhun VP  blog
  • Introduction to Creating OData Service in HANA Cloud Integration (beta)
  • Creating OData Service from SOAP using HCI (beta)

There is an upcoming workshop for customer going to held at SAP Labs, Bangalore, check this blog for more info:

HANA Cloud Platform End to End Customer Worksho… | SCN

#HappyLearning #HappySharing