Adam Kiwon - SAP Interface Management Guide

Integration and interfaces have become indispensable in modern IT landscapes. As we encounter these terms in everyday IT, our understanding associated with these concepts varies. Typical questions asked at the beginning of almost every project include What specifically is an interface? or How do we integrate system A and system B? The field that opens up through these questions is often difficult to grasp and hard to keep track of. Thus, a multitude of different methods and frameworks offer advice on how you can design, not only interfaces, but also the entire organization behind them. In addition, more and more tools can support you in implementing and controlling the IT landscape. Each tool has its own focus, so orchestrating and managing the interaction of all these tools is a growing challenge.

From personal experience, we know that getting started with the various concepts underpinning integration can be quite difficult. Therefore, this book offers you, the reader, a comprehensive overview of the basics and at the same time can serve as a practical guide teaching you the fundamental starting points in the field of integration. This understanding should help you orient yourself in a dynamic and quickly-developing IT world, assess new technologies, and identify individual solutions and approaches that best suit your individual IT landscapes.

This book is aimed at integration architects, interface developers, and administrators of SAP landscapes who must decide which integration products to use in their companies and who need information on how individual solutions and tools interact. This book also offers starting ideas on how to tackle the tasks of interface management. We address project managers and IT managers who want to learn about the technical and conceptual possibilities for interface management. In addition, this book offers consultants approaches for planning hybrid landscapes with their customers and which concepts can be applied in this context.

This book is intended to support you in proactively tackling and mastering the typical challenges in interface management. This book follows the structure shown in . What you wont find in this book are step-by-step tutorials or in-depth details on how the individually presented integration tools must be set up or developed in a productive environment. Instead, we provide a structured overview of the basic technologies and concepts, the organizational approaches in the integration environment, and practical application examples from our everyday work.

Figure 1 Structure of the Book

Part I , Basics, forms the foundation. From , youll get a feel for the typical challenges common in interface management. In this context, possible approaches to your management processes are explained. We also introduce you to the technological basics of integration.

, SAP Interface Management in the Age of Digitalization , lays the foundations. We explain the history of interfaces in the SAP environment. In this process, well address the need for data exchange as well as the nature of large heterogeneous landscapes. Youll get to know the different sources of interfaces in the various SAP systems. Furthermore, well introduce you to SAP API Business Hub, and youll learn about SAP Graph, which allows access to the SAP world organized by objects. Youll need to keep an eye on a multitude of aspects and permanently educate yourself in technology and methods.

Building on this foundation, , Integration Concepts and Technologies in the SAP Environment , provides the basic technological knowledge required to work in the integration environment. We present the integration architectures used today and look at the different integration styles available. Our focus will be on process-oriented integration. We also present the technologies that can be used within each integration style.