Comparison of XI and other EAI tools

[Former Member]

Hi

We wish to draw a comparison between XI and other EAI tools available in the market especially SeeBeyond and Mercator.

Any comparative study on these three tools especially in the areas mentioned below, or otherwise, will be highly appreciated

1 Connectivity: Packaged Application adapters, Middleware adapters, Adapters to file system, mainframes and databases. Availability of custom adapters.

2 Transformation and mapping tools

3 Content based routing: Routing of data based on message content

4 Business Process Composition: Component model for BP composition as well as support for control and data flow modeling.

5 Message Warehousing: Message persistence for store and forward as well as support for message mining and message archiving

6 Business Process monitoring: Real time monitoring of processes as well as components involved in BP.

7 Compose and execute Business processes that invoke WebServices

8 Dynamic reconfiguration of Business processes: Flexible to support reconfiguration of business process with no or minimal intervention

9 Multi language support: Component development, code generation support in various programming languages

10 J2EE, .Net and WebServices support

11 Performance and scalability

12 24 X 7 reliability and security

Regards

Siddhartha Jha

[Former Member]

I strongly disagree with Colin's comment on XI and CrossWorlds comparison as I think XI is a much mature and stronger product compared to any other EAI tool in the market.

I would suggest that you go through service.sap.com/xi website to find more detailed information on XI.

In short - XI supports all the functionalities that you are looking for:

1. Connectivity - XI has all technology adapters built in to support JMS, File, Database, HTTP and Soap connectivity. SAP works with 3rd party vendors for custom adapters - EDI, Oracle applications, etc.

2. XI supports graphical mapping tool - also you can write mapping program in Java or ABAP

3. Content based routing is supported in XI. XI is completely based on open standards xPath and XML

4. XI has a GUI based BPM component which is based on UML modelling

5. All messages are persisted in XI database and can be arcvhived base don archiving rules

6. Runtime workbench component of XI gives you sigle monitoring vies for - XI components, messages, configuration of alerts and end-to-end monitoring

7. XI BPM component can invoke webservices

8. supported

9. XI is a unicode system and supports Multiple languages

10. XI is based on open standards and supports J2EE, .NET and Websphere integration

11. Highly performance efficient and scalable - I have never seen any performance realted issues with XI - hardware is the only limit

12. You can contact SAP support for 24*7 technical support

[Former Member]

Isn't there an old saying "He who rejects the evaluation shall considered to be biased"?

I'd vote for the evaluation/comparison with respect to the scenario considered.

Moreover I'd randomly challenge two of the answers given.

ad 4. ...based on UML modelling...? The Business process engine is based on BPEL (business process engine language). AFAIK there's no direct support of UML modelling. I am not aware of any reasonable UML2BPEL tool or anything similar.

ad 7. wow!

ad 11. unfortunately not yet I suppose. "hardware is the only limit" can be read as "performance and scalability can be tackled by enourmous amounts of hardware ressources". Ressource I'd better say, since distribution of XI components over various machines is ... well dunno.

Ooos, three points.

Nevertheless, if I've got a number of SAP backends already, I'd prefer XI. Get used to 3.0, get my basic communications running and prepare for 4.0, or 3.63 or 3.10...whatever it will be named

Just my 2 cents,

tony

[Former Member]

I agree with the famous saying and here are my 2 cents:

ad 4 ... BPEL is the execution language and not the modelling language - UML is a modelling language in which you start with identifying use cases etc. XI supports UML in the sense that there is a business view for the BPM scenarios that can be used by Business analysts to design the processes and they get drilled down into activity diagrams, etc. and finally BPEL language is used to execute these business processes.

ad 7 - not sure what your point is here???

ad 11 - by far I have worked with scenarios involving over million transactions every day without any issue - I am not sure what you mean by "not yet supported" but I can definitely point you to some official sizing and scalability benchmarks which is really impressive.

I hope this helps!

[Former Member]

Yes, but these are all available in IBM CrossWorlds too

[Former Member]

I agree - but you are missing one critical point here - XI comes pre-integrated with SAP and new SAP solution . If you have SAP then XI will cut down the cost by at least 40% for development by cutting down resources and time.

[Former Member]

...a million transactions per day...

I really wish there were a SAP success story on XI 3.0 (three-dot-nil!) like this (and I am sure there will once be some) but until now I am not aware of any close to this and I closely followed ramp-up experiences reports on TECHED and other reports.

And I doubt the scalability unless I haven't been shown how to distribute the business process engine over several machines.

[says one who asks himself how he should access the customers integration repository and directory remotely without breaking the integrity of the customer's firewall - and mine. in short - rpc s...s]

tony

[Former Member]

OK - you win !!

SAP XI 3.0 is a vast improvement over XI 2.0. The big winner seems to be the proxies you can use from SAP Web AS 6.40 onwards.

Have a good weekend.

Colin

[Former Member]

Hi All,

One point to add to this old posting. The development effort is reduced through preconfigured XI content provided by SAP. But this happens only in very specific cases in SCM, MDM, SRM, SEM etc. I couldn't find much of standard content for R/3. So for custom integration, this doesn't help.

regards,

Madhavan

[Former Member]

Hi,

Take a look at SeeBeyond at http://www.seebeyond.com.

i would also recommend taking a look at IBM CrossWorlds (used to be just CrossWorlds but they were bought out and integrated into IBM Websphere product although it can be purchased separately). It runs on MQ series as the message brokering system so is very persistant and reliable. It also has all of the other points you are looking for in your list in great detail so check out the product at IBM's web site.

In my humble opinion, IBM CrossWorlds is about 2 years ahead of XI in available functionality (I have 3 years experience using Crossworlds and have also used XI 3.0)

Hope this helps.

Kind regards

Colin