What it takes to be certified in SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) C_CP_I_12?

[manubhutani]

'Ten minutes left, shall I make a cup of coffee real quick? Yes, No, Yes' I got up to make coffee and pulled the kitchen curtain.
It was a bright white night. Almost 10 inches of snow all over. My patio lights were shining like gold. I kept looking at that amazing view for 3-4 minutes.

'Six minutes left, no time for coffee now'. Got my DL (Driving license) from the wallet, removed my books from the table. Removed junk files from the laptop and clicked the start button.

Voice from the other side 'Hi, I will be your proctor today....Can you please show me your government approved id?' It was weird when he said 'Is it you in
this DL?' I replied 'yes sir, what made you say so'
'Do you have an id in which you don't have beard?'
'Oh.. I changed my look sir, Do you think I look better in DL?'
He laughed but didn't answer my question. Anyways he was convinced that DL belonged to me.

I was quite confident after quickly answering first 6 questions in a minute. Here comes the tricky one. Finally 80th question. I had no idea about this last question.
Tried my luck on that and clicked submit and closed my eyes for few seconds. Silence. Opened one eye to see the outcome. 'Congratulations' it said.

After working on SAP CPI in 3 projects I have a good hold on the subject. I have worked as an Admin for SAP Cloud Platform (SCP), which helped a lot.
I know most of the things about security in SCP. I know the iflow development, configuration and monitoring. I remember when one of my clients gave me a
fresh SAP CPI instance and asked 'How soon can we make it working?'

Connectivity, Authorizations, Keys, certificates, encryption keys and so on. I have had an opportunity to work on all this. You should have a good command on this to be a good application associate.

You should know about SAP cloud solutions and offerings. Here's a good read -
You need to be well versed with the capabilities of the cloud platform. Here's the overview -
I must say spend some time reading its capabilities here.. This is really vast but very important.
You should be very clear about the different deployment models given by SAP which include Private, Public, Hybrid, On-premise and Managed cloud. If you have
worked on cloud projects you can easily relate.

It is very common in cloud projects where you have to connect cloud system to the customer's on-premise/legacy systems. You should know the process end-to-end.
Here's a quick read around this topic. Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC) is one of the most important topic. Don't get surprised to see some questions around this. Here's some useful information.

SAP CPI offers a number of integration capabilities to define different message processing ways. You may refer this for more information.
SAP CPI offers a number of sender and receiver adaptors. Here's a good read on this topic.
If you don't have hands on experience in these adaptors then make sure you understand all the concepts of each and every adaptor because this is the heart of SAP CPI.
You should also know about troubleshooting and monitoring the iflows in SAP CPI.

All the best and yes you would need atleast 69% to become SAP Certified Application Associate - SAP Cloud Platform Integration.