SAP - third party software integration over PI and OSB

[IN]

Hello,

I have a specific kind of question concerning SAP integration with third party software in middle size company (30.000 employees, energy industry). Project manager has decided to use a very unusual kind of global solution for the integration and opposite to him I am not very excited with chosen one. The solution for the integration is:

Third party software - Oracle service Bus - SAP PI/PO - SAP ERP

I have a few concerns about this:

• Licence issue (cost issue)
• Double the chances for error because of two integration tools used between systems
• Double maintenance and administration (two totally different teams)

I have to mention that we have both tools implemented in our company and at the moment all SAP integrations (SAP - SAP, SAP - 3rd party software) are done over SAP PI. Important information is that we have more than one SAP system. Company management has decided to go for Oracle Service Bus as new integration tool for non-SAP software, so the question was raised. What will be the 3rd party software integration plan for SAP ERP (central system in the company)?

Sorry for a little bit long intro.

The main question is this. Is it clever to do third party integration over 2 integration tools or it's better to pick just one as global solution for the company, pros and cons of each one of this? Does anyone have experience with this kind of solution?

Best regards,

Igor

[Muniyappan · Accepted solution]

I have seen this kind of architecture in two of my previous projects. But it was due to that third party applications are already integrated using other ESB(IBM Websphere,oracle ESB, etc).

Third party –Oracle ESB – PI – SAP ECC

Third party –IBM ESB– PI – SAP ECC

At start, some companies do the integration using other ESB and when they introduce SAP as new one, this question pops up. Of course PI is recommended by sap to integration the SAP systems. But having existing integration done by other ESB and introducing SAP PI in the middle, raises two question. You have already listed point 1. Point 2 will be that how we can migrate the existing interfaces from other ESB to PI. This is the main driving factor why some companies go with two Middleware in the landscape.

Once integration is done using two middleware, later you can think of how to migrate the interfaces from one to others. So that you can have one consolidated middleware.

[anjaneya_bhardwaj2]

The interesting points here are,

a) Is their a certain amount of ease in integrating the Third party with OSB compared to integrating the third party with SAP directly ,do we know that as of now. what if the third party and OSB work in a seamless manner and hence they make one box. Bcause from SAP end the effort is still the same.

b) is there a case of making a Parallel OSB integration with other system beyond sap like Third party -> OSB -> Third Party .

I think answer to these would help us define the root cause for management decision .

[Ryan-Crosby]

Hi Igor,

We have this type of situation here specifically related to the scenario that Muniyappan has described. We have the PO system for SAP integration but we already had a separate middleware that has been in use so several of our integration scenarios run through both systems. The biggest problem I have seen with it is tracing performance across the separate nodes for real-time integration. We can only observe and tune performance as it relates to the SAP platform but we will get questions regarding overall performance and yet have zero visibility or control to anything that happens beyond our PO system. I don't agree with the approach but I end up having to live with it because of elements outside of my control.

Regards,
Ryan Crosby

[IN]

Thank you Ryan. I am pretty sure that I will also end up like you because of management decision. I will do my best not to end up like that, but it will be very difficult to convince company management after all.

Regards,

Igor Nikolic

[Muniyappan]

Adding to my above comment, if you are newly introducing Oracle ESB for the sake of third-party integration, then you points are valid. You should go with only PI/PO

[IN]

Thank you for your insight.

Greetings,

Igor