I was started my career as SAP developer back in 2000. I was fortunate to have the opportunities to work and experience on various large SAP implementation projects for a leading electronics manufacturing company. During those times, integration to SAP was quite limited - people could thought that SAP was a "black box" to the outside world. I partly agreed and it was all depended on the integration scenarios you were facing. If you want to get messages(such as EDI) to exchange to another partner. This could be achieved through configuring a business IDOC document and mapped to your partner EDI message as agreed in contract, you might need a few assistance via custom ABAP to get this done. Your message could deliver to your partner via FTP as a very normal case. So what if the business come back weeks later that they need to change the mappings, the exercise would need to review through configuration and custom code - very time extensive both development and testing.
That was for batched business documents exchange, so how could you achieve for real-time communication such as over HTTP?
SAP released SAP Internet Transaction Server(ITS) to address this requirement. Was this any use? Development using SAP ITS was cumbersome, SAP developers were required to challenge new scripting - SAPScript and HTML, and how this blended with your ABAP code. This was unattractive to a number of ABAP developers, but at the end this was worked but not so ideal to me. In addition, finding a SAP ITS developer was very rare, or sometimes we asked "Do they exist"?
I had moved on with my role with some intact around SAP integration, and along with working on Microsoft technologies. On the other end, integration market was moved more much faster and come along with a number of System Integration players and one of them were webMethods(now is owned by SoftwareAG). SAP was acquired part of webMethods license, and jointly developed with webMethods to have a product SAP Business Connector(aka SAP BC). Life as SAP integration developer was much improved till the days that SAP BC(v4.6, v4.7) was now no longer support by SAP, but still there a of number companies are running with known ongoing risks with support and supporting resources are becoming rare.
However, now a days, business systems are quite complex and the integration landscape has changed. Demand for Service-oriented Architectures(SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus(ESB) capabilities. SAP BC is no longer the solution to these requirements but to me it is becoming a burden to maintain & future upgrades, and it is becoming an on ongoing liability. Then, we started to evaluate a number of integration products to migrate to, and after for many seasons - we came to agree and had selected Microsoft BizTalk as our Integration platform, this was based on the company IT's strategy, and current investment on Microsoft technologies and skillsets(yes there were more). So with my previous company, they were moved along to using IBM WebSphere but I did not have the contacts for the reasons.
So what your company's SAP integration has migrated to beyond SAP BC? SAP XI? Tibco...? WebSphere? webMethods? I love to hear this from you and what's the experience like?
Cheers,
Andy
