I have presented my master thesis last week and started to work for HP as a junior product chef. I have spent more than 4 months to complete my master thesis and the most single difficult part for me was the writing part. I think it is crucial to have good communication with your academic supervisor, since he/she decides how you should write and how much you should write. After this master thesis I began to abhor the communication problems. Giving an example, I wrote 100 pages at the beginning and spent almost 3 weeks to write it, then my supervisor wanted me to cut it down to 30 pages (max.). It was a very big hassle. Moreover, my supervisor did not want me to do those changes with alacrity. Because of that I had to wait two more months before I present my master thesis. Any way it is still good that I have the rights to decry my supervisor and my own work. By the way, my academic supervisor was Gustaf Juell-Skielse from KTH and he is a very experienced Accenture consultant. I have learned a lot from him and he has incisive comments which make me work harder and harder. But my recommendation for those of you, who will write master thesis, is that; talk to your supervisor very very clearly at the beginning. What he/she wants you to do, how much and how does he/she want you to write and so on. Because time management is difficult and you might waste your time if your supervisor changes his/her mind.

However, it was a priceless experience to work in one of the biggest energy companies at Europe and has an experienced academic supervisor back at school. Even if I had some difficult times to finish my thesis, I liked it and enjoyed a lot. In case you need, I am sharing my final master thesis (believe me, this is the real final version:) ) and my final presentation down here:

SAP Systems Integration Master Thesis Real Final Version

I have written my master thesis about SAP systems integration at one of the biggest energy companies in Europe. The company is called Vattenfall and owned by Swedish government. Since the size of the company is large, so that the data size which will be transferred within and outside of the company is also large. Thats why systems integration plays a very crucial role in Vattenfall’s IT concerns. The company is very much SAP centric and the SAP systems are increasing in number and size. This increasing trend intensifies the need for SAP systems integration and an integration platform, which is the most plug and play integration engine for SAP systems, could be of benefit. That’s why I made a qualitative study to evaluate SAP NetWeaver PI to help Vattenfall Nordic to decide whether it can be used as main integration platform at Vattenfall Nordic instead of BizTalk.

SAP PI is coming! I think the product will be used more commonly once SAP solves the core problems. For example SAP PI is a dual stack product and complex to configure, use and manage. The product is very much based on hub and spoke, centralized architecture. But I think it must be (will be) 100% java based, distributed product. Also SAP NetWeaver BPM and PI are emerging more and more. These are all good things for the future of the product. As I mentioned before, PI is coming and will be used commonly in SAP depended companies!

I do not want to write all of my finding again but, you can download my master thesis from here: SAP Systems Integration Master Thesis Final Report. I look forward to hearing from you.

I finally finished my master thesis and wrote my final report. Originally it was 100 pages and now I am trying to cut it down to 35-40 pages. As a summary my final thought about SAP PI are that;

It is crucial to understand the companies’ application landscape and then make a final decision to go for one integration platform. Because in fact, it is really difficult to say PI is definitely better than BizTalk or vice versa. Giving an example, many large SAP customers already selected an integration platform. But, they also know that PI (XI) is required component of some SAP modules. Therefore they try to understand the product and decide how much they are going to use it. As far as seen on the market, they are introducing SAP PI along with their established integration platform, mostly to support SAP-to-SAP integration scenarios. Where this looks like an advantage, most of the other companies do not want to deal with two different integration platforms. In this case, if a company wants to adopt their integration platform strategy with SAP, gradually moving to SAP PI is the best way to go for by 2009. Because, as a result of the research, SAP NetWeaver PI will have a revolutionary change and this might cause serious problems for old PI investments. In addition to this, it is for sure that replacing all BizTalks with PI is not really a strong business case, because PI is still not a perfect product and needs a bit more real life experience.

After 4 months of research about SAP NetWeaver PI, the researcher makes two predictions about future of SAP PI;

1- PI will be 100% Java based product. It means, SAP will re-write the ABAP part or make an OEM agreement to replace ABAP with an already available solution in the market.
2- Currently, PI is based on hub and spoke, centralized architecture. First development of XI (PI) started as a part of MySAP technology but right now SAP has NetWeaver which is more distributed, SOA oriented base technology. So, XI is not a perfect match since it does not support distributed architecture. Because of SAP’s eSOA strategy they need to make integration based on more distributed architecture. By doing that they can dramatically reduce the total cost of owner ship and increase availability and performance. So, this will also cause a major change on product.

These changes can be done in two ways;
1- SAP will outsource PI to some other middleware company but will continue to development of this product. Because they already sold PI or XI to 50% of their large SAP users and they cannot suddenly stop supporting the product. Also, PI is playing a centric role for SAP’s ESOA strategy. So that, if SAP wants to be successful on this, they have to pay more attention to integration since this is one of the most crucial part of ESOA mentality.
2- SAP will buy another middleware company or make an OEM agreement to add their solution to PI in order to make it 100% Java based and distributed architecture based more open product.

So, it is important to keep all these in mind before making a buying decision. As mentioned before, a radical architectural change on PI, rather than an incremental evaluation, is expected. In order to mitigate the risks, it is recommended to be careful where companies use PI right now. For the time being, it is recommended to use PI within SAP landscape and for opportunistic applications, which means not mission critical projects. Also, make a good calculation about ROI. If it is 10 years, changing already established integration platform to PI is not recommended.

To sum up, both integration solutions have bad news – good news situation. As PI adoption grows, SAP will invest more into this technology. But if they want to penetrate into the main market, they have to enrich the functionality of their solution against competing integration platforms. Because current picture clearly shows that PI is dominantly used only by SAP customers. While this can be seen as a success, there are still lots of miles to go for SAP. Both integrated middleware approach (SAP PI) and best of breed approach (SAP PI + MS BizTalk) has pros and cons. So, it is up to company to decide which way to go. As mentioned earlier; unlike “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” there is not a “final answer” to this ongoing debate.

You can get my final master thesis report if you send me an email from: SAP Systems Integration Master Thesis Report

I will be happy to hear your comments.

I am working towards my master degree thesis about SAP systems integration and at some point I needed to learn the easiest way to explain what is SAP NetWeaver and what is the systems integration. While looking for some boring PDFs I have found this video, which is much more fun to learn from, and wanted to share it with you. Enjoy !

NetWeaver is SAP’s latest application platform suite and the foundation for all future SAP applications. As companies add new SAP applications or upgrade to mySAP ERP, the core components of NetWeaver will automatically be there. For example; Enterprise Portal, Process Integration, Master Data Management, Business Process Management, Business Intelligence.

This means SAP PI will be part of SAP investments and it will already be there. Another important fact is that if a company purchases SAP applications such as, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Product Lifecycle Management SAP PI is the standard integration platform from R/3 and other applications to these new modules. Because all of these solutions are built on top of the NetWeaver platform and PI is the integration part of NetWeaver platform suite. So, all of the mySAP licensees have access to this tool set waiting unused on the shelf, if they decide not to use PI. All in all, for large SAP customers it is not a question of  “if” it is a question of “when and how much” are they going to use SAP PI.

But on the contrary, SAP XI (now called PI) is definitely a “closed” product. It runs on a SAP Web Application Server, which is a combination of a J2EE stack and ABAP stack (ABAP is the proprietary SAP programming language). The core parts of SAP PI run in this ABAP stack, in particular all the queuing and business processes (BPEL). Other parts such as connectivity and adapters runs in theJ2EE stack. Most software assets that are developed in PI are proprietary (maybe except for XSLT transformations). So software components from 3rd parties (such as iWay or Seeburger) need to be customized to run on/in PI. The architecture of SAP PI/XI is definitely closed and proprietary, but so are most integration solutions.

On the other hand SAP does endorse a large number of standards: J2EE, HTTP(S), XML, XML Schema, SOAP, WSDL, WS-Security, . Like all the other integration vendors. PI comes out-of-the-box with adapters for JMS, File/FTP, JDBC, HTTP, SOAP and obviously the SAP specific IDoc and RFC adapters. The (XMB) protocol that PI uses internally to communicate between its different components (standalone adapter engines, proxies, other PI instances) is based on SOAP with Attachments (MIME), with proprietary extensions for security and reliability.

From the experiences of other people, SAP PI works OK and is a good integration solution that matches the offerings of other EAI vendors. But it is a rather complex product. Now, PI only makes sense if you have a large SAP installation and a major part of your applications are from SAP. In particular, your SAP team can leverage their knowledge to manage an integration solution that runs on the same base infrastructure. If SAP applications only play a minor role in your organization, you might still deploy PI for opening up your SAP applications and SAP-2-SAP interfacing, but you will most likely combine this with other integration solutions.

So, because of all these problems and complexity, it is not recommended to use PI outside SAP world. But, SAP is investing time and money to make their product more open and simple. So, just wait and see how PI will penetrate into the main market. I have lots of cool ideas and documents about the future of PI, just fallow my blog and my master thesis report.

PS: Thanks to Guy Crets from Belgium

I know that it is really difficult to calculate the TCO before using an integration platform. But still we can make some calculations based on the price strategy given from SAP and Microsoft.

Licenses fees are varying from vendor to vendor. For example, pricing of BizTalk Server is done by an Enterprise Agreement (EA). An EA typically runs for 3 years, and when you buy products in an EA, you also buy Software Assurance (SA), a yearly fee that amongst other secure access to all new versions of the product that are released during the agreement period. There are also a lot of other benefits included in SA, like support incidents and vouchers for training. Typically the yearly SA cost is 25% of the license price (L).

On the other, SAP PI license prices are based on volumes. SAP PI Base Engine is priced based on the overall processed message volume expressed in Gigabytes (GB) per month. SAP PI license for SAP-to-SAP usage is included in NetWeaver 2004 suite license and MySAP license. For some large SAP customers, special discounts are available and price mentality of SAP is “more you use less you pay” (we can also call it progressive scale).SAP PI is free to use between SAP-to-SAP. But not free for SAP-to-NonSAP or NonSAP-to-NonSAP. SAP internal interfaces are free, no need to pay licenses fees for that. Adapters are only available in conjunction with the SAP PI Base Engine or SAP NetWeaver Foundation for Third Party Applications license. Adapters are priced based on the processed message volume or based on the number of connected systems.

So, more or less it is clear that the SAP PI is much better to use for SAP-to-SAP connections, because it is totally free. But, BizTalk look a bit better to use for high data volumes and B2B style connections.

Also, PI has lots of pre-built content for SAP-to-SAP connections. So, the development efforts and “agility” is much higher than BizTalk for these kinds of scenarios.

Adoption of SAP PI platform is growing rapidly, primarily for SAP’s application customer base. However, despite SAP’s crucial improvements, PI is still lacking of most-advanced platforms’ abilities. But it will still be used commonly by SAP base customers.

Graph below, shows the roadmap of SAP PI starting from SAP XI versions. From my point of view, there are 3 major versions of product. Phase 1 is SAP XI 2.0 and SAP XI 3.0, phase 2 is SAP PI 7.0 and phase 3 is SAP PI 7.1. SAP invested a lot of engineering hours for PI and tried to provide the most up to date features in it. But, like all the products in integration platforms market, PI has some pros and cons.

Graph 1: SAP PI product versions

In particular, SAP PI is proven as SAP oriented product and is widely used by SAP customers. According to a statistic from SAP, only 5% of the PI or XI users are non-SAP customers. So, it clearly shows that PI is very SAP centric product and fits better to SAP product portfolio.

On the other hand, well known vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Tibco, Sun Microsystems are functionally richer than SAP PI because they focus not only to SAP but also to other application packages. For example they provide much complex event processing, business activity monitoring and other advanced integration features. However, PI is highly optimized for SAP systems and provide much more pre-built integration metadata and it is more similar to SAP systems.

SAP PI license for SAP-to-SAP usage is included in NetWeaver 2004 suite license and MySAP license. For SAP to Non-SAP integration PI base engine is priced based on the overall processed message volume expressed in Gigabytes (GB) per month. For some large SAP customers, special discounts are available and price mentality of SAP is “more you use less you pay” (we can also call it progressive scale).

To match PI with Microsoft BizTalk technology, please refer to the graph 2 below.

Graph 2: SAP PI and BizTalk Functional Coverage

You can download the full version of research paper from here: High Level Comparison of SAP PI and MS BizTalk

I am working on a project about systems integration and I needed to evaluate two vendors, Microsoft and SAP, within a market.  SOA (service oriented architecture) continue to catalyze interest in IT market. But, development of SOA applications requires a new style of development environment that extends beyond design-time and into runtime usage. Products built on such technology are emerging as key foundation. I think in the market, there are two powerful SOA middle-ware products available now, which are MS BizTalk and SAP PI (then I think the IBM comes). I need to make a selection between two products and to do this; I use several methods and tools to evaluate the vendor and product. One of the methods that I use is called Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

My evaluation criterias are;

• SOA and Web services support
• Vendor’s product strategy
• Vendor locked-in effect
• Licenses fees
• Technology Uniqueness
• Manageability from a development perspective
• Degree of product integration

While the items included here are not the only criterias for me (because I also have lots of company strategies and regulations), they will still be the primary determinants for me. So, the result can be seen from the graph. Talking about the characteristics; MS BizTalk is located in the challengers category. General characteristics of this group are that; “Executes well today or may dominate a large segment, but does not understand market direction clearly”. Then I positioned SAP PI in to the visionaries group because I believe; “SAP understand where the market is going and has a vision for changing market rules, but does not yet execute well”. But from my point of view, they will both end-up in leaders segment sooner or later. But the question that i need to answer is that; wich one is better to use righ now?

Reasons why I placed them in that groups are that;

For Microsoft;  company delivers multiple products that contribute to its OSA strategy, including Oslo, Dublin and BizTalk. The company has long produced productive development environments and a process orchestration environment for all enterprise sizes. Microsoft continues to evolve its team development capabilities and unify its compositing capabilities. Through the Windows Communication Foundation, the company is driving away from a code-first mentality and toward a composition mentality. In addition, a clear focus on Web services fosters an integrated approach to creation of simple service-based systems that combine with others to encompass morecomplex solutions.

For SAP; SAP’s SOA capabilities provide visual modelling, code-free application creation and automatic code generation capabilities that enable business analysts and process experts to work together on business applications. In addition, SAP delivers SAP PI as centre of their SOA mentality and struggle to improve the product. I think it needs to be developed a bit more before being well accepted in the marke
Challengers (MS BizTalk): Challengers have a strong ability to execute but may not have a plan that will maintain a strong value proposition for new customers. Larger vendors in mature markets may often be positioned as challengers because they choose to minimize risk or avoid disrupting their customers or their own activities. Although challengers typically have significant size and financial resources, they may lack a strong vision, innovation or overall understanding of market needs. In some cases, challengers may offer products nearing the end of their lives that dominate a large but shrinking segment. Challengers can become leaders if their vision develops. Large companies may fluctuate between the Challengers and Leaders quadrants as their product cycles and market needs shift.
Visionaries (SAP PI): Visionaries align with Gartner’s view of how a market will evolve, but they have less-proven capabilities to deliver against that vision. In early markets, this status is normal. In more-mature markets, it may reflect a competitive strategy for a smaller vendor — such as selling an innovation ahead of mainstream demand — or a larger vendor trying to break out of a rut or differentiate. For vendors and customers, visionaries fall in the higher-risk/higher-reward category. They often introduce new technology, services or business models, and they may need to build financial strength, service and support, and sales and distribution channels. Whether visionaries become challengers or leaders may depend on if companies accept the new technology or if the vendors can develop partnerships that complement their strengths. Visionaries sometimes are attractive acquisition targets for leaders or challengers.

Why there is a need for Integration?
Organizations have found lots of compelling reasons to integrate their IT systems. Some have discovered that they must share order and shipment information in real time between an ERP system such as SAP R/3 and existing production applications located in warehouses or manufacturing facilities. Others have come up with equally compelling diverse scenarios. For example in an energy company there exists lots of external parties involving in different part of the business. In such a huge sector companies need to share some information both internally and externally.

What Do Integration Solutions Do?
-          Integrate systems that were not designed to work together
-          Accommodate various elements of information technology that may be dissimilar and incompatible
-          Integrate across an increasingly broad organizational scope, perhaps encompassing multiple separate businesses
-          Make maximum use of information
-          Accommodate and even proactively exploit change
-          Support the way the business operates, not the other way around

Why integrate systems and applications?
A successfully integrated enterprise can reward your organization with significant cost, resource, and time savings. Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI) connects existing and new systems to enable collaborative operation within your entire organization.
A successfully integrated system allows information to work harder and smarter, increasing the speed of business reaction time, and facilitating seamless, straight-through transaction processing.
Although a number of Integration solutions-Middleware technologies are available in the market. Some of them are briefly discussed here.

SAP Process Integration (SAP PI – SAP XI)
BizTalk
Web methods
IBM MQSeries/WebSphere
Mercator
Oracle fusion

Sap PI (XI)
PI is well suited for connecting SAP systems with each other and with non-SAP.  SAP PI provides an integrated work flow engine that allows defining adapters to non-XML protocols and mappings to convert data content from source to target format.
PI is handy for particularly SAP-to-NonSAP interfaces where you can import standard integration content. Also PI has got sophisticated open standard adapter framework which is very easy to implement and custom logic can be implemented using Adapter module programming.

Advantages

1. Monitoring is better than any other middleware product. It offers exhaustive monitoring features like message, performance, component monitoring etc, all of which can be used to track and rectify the errors. It follows a hub and spoke model.
2. When you need to integrate with an SAP system PI has an advantage in supporting various SAP components and so on.
3. Mappings and adapters are good as comparable with any other middleware product.
4. Synchronous & Asynchronous communication is possible.

Dis-Advantages

1. Web methods are particularly good if u have B2B kind of communication with their Trading Partners product.
2. PI is lacking full-fledged Message Queue compared to other established Middleware products.
3. It does not have a messaging layer exposed by APIs like IBM MQ-Series.
4. SAP relies on other vendors except for a few adapters.
5. Difficult to find competence for SAP PI projects, expensive consultants

MS BizTalk
BizTalk is a business process management (BPM) server that enables companies to automate and optimize business processes. This includes powerful, familiar tools to design, develop, deploy, and manage those processes.
While planning for the integration scenario BizTalk takes care about tasks like Gathering information, Defining naming conventions, planning team development, setting up and working with source control.

Advantages

1. Relatively easy to find good consultants.
2. Recoverable Interchange. In BizTalk, an Interchange can contain two or more messages, such as a batch. With the introduction of Recoverable Interchange in BizTalk Server 2006, only messages that fail validation are suspended, and the messages can be resumed after the error is corrected.
3. Failed message routing. New functionality is available to allow orchestration and send ports to subscribe to failed messages. When used appropriately, failed message routing can be used for notifying users of failed messages or building rich error handling and message repair capabilities.
4. Lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). BizTalk Server reduces the cost and complexity of automating and managing business processes with a single, unified solution for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI),
5. Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi), and Business Process Management (BPM).
6. Enhanced productivity through integrated management and development tools.
7. Supports Computer Telephony Interface (CTI) through TAPI.

Dis-Advantages

1. Recovery is manual.
2. Fault Tolerance capabilities are supported through other Microsoft products.
3. Repository only works with MS SQL.
4. Only runs on Microsoft/Intel platform and only supports XML Schema Definition (XSD).
5. BizTalk is completely built on .Net. (Is this an advantage or dis-advantage?)

Besides all these pros and cons, I would like to have a look at to the vendor locked-in effect. But so far, there is not an easy method to calculate it. If I find something, I will write a new blog entry.

Source: SAP Network Wiki and Microsoft Web Site

I am writing my master thesis about SAP Process Integration and would like to start posting about my findings. For a large, international company I am doing a field research to decide when to use SAP PI and when to use BizTalk. Currently company use point-to-point, BizTalk or internally developed solutions for internal and/or external system integration but because of the fact that they started to use more and more SAP systems a new integration platform is needed and of course the SAP PI looks like the best match for SAP-to-SAP integrations.

In today’s IT landscape there exist lots of legacy systems processing data and having dependency on each others. Huge amount of crucial data is processed in traditional ways, so it is almost impractical to even think of removing or seperating those systems. Those systems include internally developed applications, bought from external vendors or software acquired via merger and acquisitions. Therefore it is important to understand the characteristics of the different platforms and apply the best practices to have a well blended, smoothly working system. If we can achieve our goal, we will be able to lower TCO (total cost of ownership) and increase ROI (return of investment). SAP PI (previously known as SAP XI) drives integrated business process across heterogeneous and highly dynamic landscape in a more manageable, cost effective way.

If we need to talk about SOA, as the future overview for business and IT strategy merges therefore promises to provide higher RIO (return of investment) and lower TCO (total cost of ownership), SAP NetWeaver PI can be the central integration platform for managing A2A and B2B process integrations and provide the foundations for SOA. To reach our desired goals there are some critical factors, which will affect the final decision. I plan to divide the criterias as primary and secondary criterias. From my point of view;

Primary Criterias (“show stoppers”)
1- Cost of integration
2- Ability of technology to deliver perfect solution to meet the requirements
3- Technical features (availability of adapters, platform capabilities)

Secondary Criterias
1- The volume of data to be integrated
2- Long running or short running project
3- Infrastructure requirements
4- Complexity of integration
5- Vendor lock-in effect
6- Licences fee
7- Total cost of platform (presales, after sales and all other fees)

I am still in the early phases of my research and need more investigation to achieve more concrete results. I am going to continue writing about my master thesis topic and findings. May be some of my ideas will change during the research phase. But i am sure at the end I will produce an entrepreneurial solution for the problem.