This is in continuity of my first blog about SAP HANA Cloud Integration (HCI) where I share my perspective (or you may say randomly put all the thoughts swirling in my head) of this evolving product.
Connectivity:
HCI currently has three connectivity option (lets call it 'adapter' as in SAP PI terminology) - IDoc, SOAP and SFTP.
SAP is soon planning to add SuccessFactors, REST and a few more adapter. I think there is a lot of room for improvement in this area.
Opinion:
Monitoring:
Most of the monitoring capabilities for HCI lies within the 'Integration Operations' perspective of the Eclispe development environment. For each tenant (in simple words customers), a separate agent is available which will be used to track all the messages passing through HCI. For each message, the detailed logs can be seen for the route traversed by each message and technical communication made with the external systems. However, this will be hidden from the customers and will completely be managed currently by SAP. SAP will act as per the SLAs defined with the customer.
Opinion:
Apart from this standard monitoring, applications like SuccessFactors have their own monitoring capability to view the exchanged messages:
For FSN, SAP BackEnd systems should have FSN Connector (ABAP add-on) installed. FSN Connector has a 'Connector Monitor' (accessed via a transaction) which helps in providing additional monitoring capabilities in ECC BackEnd with details of all inbound and outbound messages. For more details on FSN, see this.
B2B Integration:
B2B support in SAP Process Orchestration (or PI) has become pretty powerful since the inception of the B2B adapter suite and related tools last year. Even before, the Seebuger suite of adapters with PI were providing pretty significant B2B connectivity options. A similar capability is therefore expected from HCI by the existing and potential customers. There is no official B2B support in HCI. I used the word 'official' because the SFTP adapter can still be used as a connectivity option for B2B messages provided you don't want to get crazy with the mappings. Good news is that SAP is planning to provide B2B connectivity options with HCI. However, SAP hasn't clarified (or may be I missed) many things in this area:
Opinion:
HCI Advantages (you probably don't realize)
As I did, you might already be comparing HCI Process Integration and Data Integration capabilities with existing on-Premise solutions like PI or BODS. When comparing with established products, you may obviously find some features missing, however, there are and could be some advantages that you might have missed so far:
Possibly in Future:
There are a few things that I think SAP should consider (if they are not already considering):
To Conclude:
HCI can currently be used as a complementary offering along with your existing middleware (on premise or cloud based) or ETL tool. The lightweight nature of HCI enables several new dimensions for process and data integration. There are already clients using HCI to provision data to HANA along with keeping their existing ETL tool in the landscape. However, to present HCI as a any-to-any Cloud Integration solution, it would take HCI some release iterations. To SAP's credit, you will see more and more sessions (or slides during the sessions) durig SAP event like TechEd talking somewhat about SAP's recommendation for integration solution but there is definitely some more work to do in that front. For the new customers introducing integration solution in their landscape, it would be interesting to see how SAP positions HCI in future among its integration offerings.
P.S: I think SAP should 'direct' community and post most of their HCI related blogs and document (where relevant) in the 1 space on SCN. I have already seen some blogs under 'SAP HANA and In-Memory Business Data Management', 'Enterprise Information Management', 'SAP HANA Cloud Platform Developer Center', 'SAP Cloud Computing'. Whichever it is, there should be one. I am using 'SAP HANA and In-Memory Business Data Management' without any real good reason. I hope someone can comment on it and one of the Moderators could move it all to one place.
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