Why integrate with SAP?
SAP has comprehensive solutions for all business processes across all industries. Solutions can give you a deep business insights into the important areas of your business. However, to get even more value out of their SAP environment, many customers integrate third party or best-of-breed applications with SAP solutions to optimize critical business functions.
This blog post, highlights the available SAP integration technologies and will give SAP partners, ISVs and start-ups some pointers, where to start and how to get help.
SAP Integration: Which SAP applications?
SAP offers a huge number of applications that can be adapted to meet the needs of all business processes. There are multiple options available, how to integrate them with other systems depending on the version you are running, platform, the underlying technology, and how it was implemented originally.
For example, in 2015 SAP released SAP S/4HANA, the newest of its business applications. SAP
S/4HANA is offered in an on-premise, cloud and hybrid version. An important component of SAP’s strategy with SAP S/4HANA is the deployment of the SAP Cloud Platform, which will provide an SAP supported hosting platform for SAP-certified third party applications and extensions, while SAP API Business Hub becomes the central repository for supported interfaces and integration content.
Any of these factors can impact your integration plans. Integrations with newer releases are handled differently than integrations with older ABAP-based releases. Integrations with cloud-based software differ from on-premise installations.
Developing an SAP Integration Path
You can design a plan considering your SAP integration. Just the matter of asking right set of questions.
- Which SAP version and applications does the customer have implemented: are they ABAP based?
- Compatible interface types: which type of interfaces would you use with your current SAP system. e.g. Web Services, IDOC’s, Odata, RFC, SOAP etc.?
- Support requirements: as a customer, do you have the IT expertise to support your own interfaces, does your software vendor support SAP interfaces?
- Your business needs: what would be the outcome of your Integration?
- Long term plans with SAP: do you have future upgrade plans? would these impact your interface choice?
In many cases, best option for customers and partners building integration is to use the SAP published and supported interface types. Many customers who adopt third-party solutions, also require that the partner integration is SAP-certified before they implement.
Choosing SAP Integration Tools
Because SAP has changed the way it builds software over the years, your integration path also depends on the version of SAP you are using. SAP Cloud Platform Integration makes cloud integration simple and reliable. It is SAP’s strategic integration platform for SAP Cloud customers. It provides out-of-the-box connectivity across cloud and on-premise solutions. Easily Integrate processes and data between cloud apps, 3rd party applications and on-premises solutions with this open, flexible, on-demand integration system running as a core service on SAP Cloud Platform.
Where to get help, if you are just starting
An overview of SAP solutions and their integration options, as well as the most common integration tools used with SAP are described in the SAP ICC Integration Technology Guide. This guide describes what technologies developers should use, so that they build solutions that are eligible for integration certification from SAP. Developers can work with the SAP Integration and Certification Center (SAP ICC), how to use these technologies to integrate a third-party product with SAP solutions or deploy it on SAP technology. Submitting their app or integration to SAP ICC for testing can make integration projects more successful for both SAP customers and ISVs. Certified apps and integrations are generally more release-stable, have a reduced implementation time and will in most cases also ensure smoother release upgrades for SAP customers.
In this guide developers, will find the following use cases addressed:
- How to build new applications on SAP technology
- How to integrate third-party applications to SAP business solutions via endorsed and SAP supported technologies and connectors
- How to enhance SAP Business One solutions with partner add-ons and integrations
We hope this overview serves as an entry point for all developers working on behalf of SAP partners, ISVs or start-ups who are aiming to offer applications that connect with SAP technologies and solutions. For additional support, please review the enablement services section in the Integration Guide. SAP ICC (SAP Integration and Certification Center) team can help you further on this.
Integration Guide:
For additional details on certifying your products, you can reach out to us at:
- icc@sap.com
- SAP Managed Tags:
