Technology Blogs by SAP
Learn how to extend and personalize SAP applications. Follow the SAP technology blog for insights into SAP BTP, ABAP, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP HANA, and more.
cancel
Turn on suggestions
Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

SAP API Management FAQ

ElijahM
Advisor
Advisor
‎08-18-2017 9:24 PM
SAP API Management is a new and diverse product in the SAP product portfolio, and is part of SAPs initiative to become a more open and agile company, in moving towards an API-First methodology. It is intended to complement the SAP API Business Hub in terms of providing secure managed governance to API consumption. Due to this radical change in operation many questions come up around APIs and API management. This blog is intended to provide updated answers to common ones.

General

1. What is an API?

APIs are Application Programming Interfaces. It is a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications. APIs are sets of requirements that govern how one application can talk to another. APIs are especially important because, they dictate how developers can create new apps that tap into big web services and social network. APIs facilitate interaction by selectively exposing certain functionalities, allowing different applications/websites/devices to communicate effectively with each other.

2. What is SAP API Management?

API Management is the process of publishing, promoting and overseeing APIs is a secure and scalable manner. SAP API Management provides secure governance over APIs based on open standards like SOAP, REST, OData, with enterprise grade security. This simplifies the way developers go about integrating with their SAP and non-SAP application, reducing cost, foster innovation and participate in the larger API economy.

3. What is the value customers should expect from SAP API Management?

SAP API Management enables provisioning, governance, security and scalability of enterprise information for digital access. It provides for one experience for managing and monitoring APIs across various data platforms (SAP and non-SAP) with real-time analytics and reporting on usage metrics.

4. How is SAP making SAP API Management available to customers?

SAP Cloud Platform, API Management is a Software as a Service On-Demand offering managed on the SAP Cloud Platform. 

 

5. What is the value customers should expect from SAP API Management in the Cloud?

With robust services for integration, identity management, mobile and collaboration, SAP Cloud Platform makes all the complicated stuff simple, so you can quickly modernize your business applications. SAP API Management can integrate seamlessly with all these services to enable enterprises to selectively externalize their assets in a device-agnostic manner, not just via the traditional browser-centric model, but also over mobile devices and any other channel required which can communicate via standard HTTP. This flexibility allows for provided services to be consumed on any platform. The cloud allows this to be done securely, and with the scalability to meet demand as needed at low investment cost, amortized over a subscription model. SAP API Management provides enhanced collaboration and co-innovation with business partners / consumers / developers by rapid onboarding and easy data visibility. By allowing customers, partners, suppliers and all users of enterprise services to directly access relevant information, enterprises drive increased revenue since information flows on-demand, in real-time. Developer portal reduces internal developments costs, and frees up developer teams to tackle other projects.

6. What is the value customers should expect from SAP API Management Hybrid model?

As the name implies, the Hybrid deployment provides the best of both OnPremises and OnDemand. Customers deploy a local instance of SAP API Management to gain the benefit of having governance sitting within the corporate network, closer to the source data, for high-security, low-latency application needs. Additionally they also get access to SAP Cloud Platform services for rapid innovation of new applications for B2C, B2B, B2E, etc. scenarios that require external access, and can scale rapidly to meet changing demands.

7. What is the pricing model for SAP API Management? 

SAP has attempted to simplify the pricing model as much as possible:

  1. Ondemand Consumption - This is a "buffet" model for subscribing to SAP Cloud Platform, which gives customers the ability to turn on / off any service at any time. Consumption of API calls through SAP Cloud Platform, API Management will be charged against customer account.

  2. OnDemand Subscription - SAP Cloud Platform, API Management is priced solely on expected customer call volume. This can be purchased in 2 ways

    1. A la carte - in blocks of 1 million API calls per month, up to the amount desired (~Billions of API calls)

    2. Bundled with other SAP Cloud Platform Services, e.g. Integration Bundle, Application Bundle. A set amount of calls per month are included in the package. Additional calls can be purchased with the a la carte method, and added to customers allowance.




Additional information can be found here: https://cloudplatform.sap.com/pricing.html

8. How is SAP API Management placed in the SAP portfolio?

SAP has many API providers such as SAP Gateway, SAP HANA Platform, S/4HANA, SAP Leonardo, SuccessFactors and many more in the road map. SAP Is centralizing the available APIs it is making available in the SAP API Business Hub, which can be seen as the SAP version of the Developer Portal and is being integrated with SAP API Management. SAP API Management services to be the centralized location for customers to manage and engage with the numerous SAP and non-SAP APIs, which helps unlock the value of digital assets, enabling in creating and delivering content and business services to consumers, partners and developers

9. How scalable is SAP API Management?

SAP API Management enables provisioning, governance, scalability and security of enterprise information for digital assets. Customers can also scale up to billions of API calls.

10.  Is SAP API Management solution multi-tenant?

Yes, it is fully multi-tenant solution.

11.  Where are the data centers located for SAP Cloud Platform, API Management service?

SAP API Management solution runs from multiple SAP data centers, Germany, US (West/East), Australia, China and Japan.

Additional Data Centers are being brought online, in addition to a multi-cloud strategy with the Cloud Foundry environment, in order to check for the latest availability SAP has provided a Data Center Availability page, which you can filter by API Management.

12. What is the difference between SAP API Management and the SAP API Business Hub?

The SAP API Business Hub is SAPs free to use catalog of pre-packaged APIs and Integration flows from across the entire SAP Portfolio as well as from SAP Partners. Here you can discover, test and consume APIs, even before you buy a product.
SAP Cloud Platform, API Management has integrated the SAP API Business Hub within it to allow you to directly copy APIs and begin to work with them in the tool.

13. Where can I learn more on SAP API Management?

There are a number of great resources that have been made available to help get started with SAP API Management:




For legacy customers please find documentation here: help.sap.com OnPremises Documentation

Please, feel free to reach out to us in the comments to this blog post in case you have further questions or comments!
19 Comments
Labels in this area
Popular Blog Posts