A Low Code Approach to Create a Simple, Connected Digital Experience with API Integration

A Low Code Approach to Create a Simple, Connected Digital Experience with API Integration

SAP Integration Suite is more than just a SAP Cloud Integration product, as it also includes the capabilities of API management and Open Connectors. Utilizing more of the SAP Integration Suite components is a great strategy to maximize your existing investment in the product. Why not use more of what SAP Integration Suite has to offer?

What is API Integration?

An API integration is the connection created between two or more applications that allows those applications to communicate with each other and exchange data.  API integration is a capability that is highly utilized in businesses today. API integration allows many high-performing businesses to keep data in sync, enhance their productivity and processes, and even help drive revenue. As a result, it’s very common for companies to have more than one API gateway provider for their API Integration needs.

How does API Integration Help?

Businesses invest in numerous integration products, depending on factors such as the source systems they need to connect to, and their underlying platform requirements. Many SAP customers are also still using on-premise investments of SAP Process Integration (PI) and SAP Process Orchestration (PO) products. Almost all businesses share a desire to reduce their costs and modernize their landscape with the cloud. In some cases, SAP Process Orchestration and SAP Process Integration customers want to get ahead of end of maintenance announcements when their legacy stacks will no longer be supported.  As a result, API integration solutions are now more important than ever as the need for integration across SAP systems, third-party systems, and line of business applications from different vendors increases.

Why SAP BTP for API Integration?

While the consumption of APIs is a standard function of software development, API providers face several unique challenges. These include securing access to sensitive data in the cloud and on-premise systems, managing APIs across a heterogeneous landscape, and creating revenue opportunities from internal and external usage.  Additionally for developers, it is important to think about SAP’s API business hub which provides many capabilities like OpenAPI specification, business documentation, as well as an API sandbox where a developer can test calls and see sample responses.

Even with SAP’s robust tool, there are some drawbacks in areas like API discovery. If a developer does not know where to start looking, it is challenging to find what might best suits their needs, as there are many integrations and API packages in the business hub.

SAP now provides similar capability for SAP BTP customers via the SAP Integration Suite’s business hub enterprise. Business hub enterprise has a broad set of platform APIs for developers to build their integration solutions with a single point of access to all APIs, powered by workflows and event-based integration with non-SAP API management software. This unified catalog consists of a tailored UX, a developer onboarding process, and an automated billing process based on rate plans. Now, a citizen developer can bridge the gap in meaningful content and learning journeys for combining SAP integration Suite with other SAP BTP services to build end-to-end use cases.

Where can I learn more about SAP’s API Integration solutions?

You can learn to develop your own low-code API developer portal with SAP’s low code approach for all APIs regardless of where they are managed via the Discovery Center mission ‘Create simple, connected digital experiences with API-based integration’.

With the following services:

• SAP AppGyver: SAP’s no-code app development platform that allows you to create applications for the Web and for native mobile use.
• SAP Integration Suite: Allows you to connect and contextualize processes and data while enabling new content-rich applications to be assembled faster with less dependence on IT.
• SAP Process Automation: Combines capabilities from SAP Workflow Management and SAP Intelligent RPA with a powerful, yet intuitive no-code development experience to drive automation.
• SAP BTP, Kyma runtime (optional): SAP’s fully managed Kubernetes runtime based on the open-source project “Kyma”. This cloud-native solution allows you to extend SAP solutions with serverless Functions and combine them with containerized microservices. The offered functionality ensures smooth consumption of SAP and non-SAP applications, running workloads in a highly scalable environment, and building event- and API-based extensions.
• SAP Cloud Identity Services’ Identity Authentication service (optional): The Identity Authentication service provides you with controlled cloud-based access to business processes, applications, and data. It simplifies your user experience through authentication mechanisms, single sign-on, on-premise integration, and convenient self-service options.

You will be able to:

• Create a unified API catalog for both external and internal developers. Similar to API business hub with a few unique and distinct requirements.
• Have full control over the user experience and the branding of the catalog. Benefiting from the robust back-end provided by the Integration Suite
• Create and maintain a fully customized experience. This is where SAP’s low code solutions like SAP AppGyver and Process Automation are a great fit.
• You can make your new portal a one-stop shop for all APIs, and make the portal available to guest users (unauthenticated) with a governed path to onboarding and requesting access to individual APIs.
• Documentation for SAP and non-SAP integrations, regardless if the API is managed by SAP or by third party. (Federation of API gateways).
• The ability to monetize based on rate plans with Stripe, and pluggable with payment provider of choice.

In summary, In this mission, you will learn how to create a single point of access for all APIs, create operational access requests, federate APIs from disparate gateways (coming soon), and monetize their use for your API integration based solutions.

Implementing this use case empowers your developer ecosystem with self-service access to APIs supported by secure digital processes. It includes reference architectures for the federation of remotely managed API (coming soon), a customized developer portal, and billing and invoicing of rate plans with Stripe.

This use case is one of our highlighted TechEd 2022 use cases. You can find the full list of all use cases being presented at TechEd 2022 on the Discovery Center here.

We encourage you to check out our BTP use case community page with related TechEd 2022
sessions.

Link to GitHub repository.

Thank you,

Cameron