SAP HCI VS PI

[Bhargavakrishna]

Hi Experts,

I referred most of the blogs related to HCI vs PI, but I'm not clear on the below points.

We are on SAP PI 7.0 and planing for upgrade. we have interfaces with IDOC /SOAP /FILE /JDBC adapters.

---> Is there any difference between standard content available in PI and HCI?

--> Can we import the interfaces from standard PI to HCI directly?

---> Can HCI handle BPM's?

---> Can we write UDF's / ABAP / JAVA / XSLT mappings in HCI?

----> Is customer or SAP is responsible for deploying certificates / set-up connectivity?

----> What is the main advantage of HCI when compared to PI?

       We have standard content available in PI /

       PI also supports Iflow's /

       we can also connect to cloud applications with the help of standard PI adapters.

As of today HCI have very limited features when compared to PI, so how can we recommend this to a customer?

To do so we should have some valid points to highlight about HCI.

I request you to give your valid inputs on this.

Thanks

Bhargava Krishna

[henrique_pinto · Accepted solution]

Hi Bhargava,

I believe this is not the best forum for those questions.

Please consider the HCP space or the PI space:

That being said, if you have very SAP-centric (IDOCs, RFCs, ABAP Proxies), you'd probably better stick with PO. HCI can consume IDOCs and RFCs if exposed as SOAP Web Services, but that'd be overhead if you already have the integrations done.

HCI is more oriented to newer and simpler integration paradigms, supporting SFTP, OData/Rest (HTTP) and SOAP mainly. It also supports IDocs through IDoc Soap connectivity. Check the latest roadmap:

https://service.sap.com/~sapidb/011000358700000367352014E.pdf

But more than protocols, leveraging either HCI or PI is more a decision based on location. Imagine you want to integrate 2 applications in your intranet - no point for HCI right? But if you're trying to integrate an intranet application (say, ERP) with different endpoints distributed all around the globe, internet connectivity starts to be an issue, and hence HCI might be a better option.

Best regards,

Henrique.