| Process Integration The traditional approach towards process integration takes two systems and puts a connection in-between those systems. By doing so companies create IT environments that are integrated at a high price; the complexity of all the 1:1 connections and the costs of setting them up and maintaining them increases rapidly. With the SAP?Exchange Infrastructure each system is connected to a central hub. This Integration Server (hub) allows for new features like central routing, mapping, monitoring and process management. Over the past ten years, lots of technical solutions have been introduced by various vendors to achieve some relief. Therein lies the problem: application integration is not merely a technical problem, it also has to be addressed from a business process perspective. The need for a common, cohesive, and standards-based infrastructure is obvious. SAP provides this with the SAP Exchange Infrastructure. Integration Broker SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) is SAP's platform for process integration based on the exchange of XML messages. SAP Exchange Infrastructure: -
Provides a technical infrastructure for XML-based message exchange in order to connect SAP components with each other, as well as with non-SAP components. -
Delivers business- process and integration knowledge to the customer, in the form of SAP's predefined business scenarios. -
Provides an integrated toolset for building new business scenarios by defining and maintaining all integration-relevant information (shared collaboration knowledge). SAP Exchange Infrastructure is based on the following principles: -
Data is exchanged between application systems in the form of XML messages. XML provides a whole new set of standards and technical building blocks that provide a huge step forward in terms of interoperability. -
Only one integration infrastructure is needed for application-to-application integration (be it SAP or non-SAP) - it is the same one that reaches out to business partners, and is the foundation of private exchanges as well as public marketplaces. -
The information stored as shared collaboration knowledge is based on XML and open standards (XPath and Java for routing, XSLT and Java for mapping, WSDL for Web services). This makes it easy to share information with customers and partners. It also fosters the ability to provide and reuse this knowledge for partners and customers and for third-party and legacy systems, taking it well beyond pure SAP-to-SAP integration. -
Although collaboration knowledge will be centralized, the infrastructure will support central and distributed execution. For efficient integration management and administration, it is key that relevant information on integration (collaboration knowledge) is visible in a central place. -
The SAP Exchange Infrastructure will deliver content on SAP-to-SAP integration, plus the potential for out-of-the-box integration of SAP components with other systems. Business Process Management Business process management is the science of designing and automating processes in a flexible manner. The flexibility is important for SAP customers who demand being able to redesign the processes to adapt to their own environment, instead of following the route suggested by SAP development. To achieve this flexibility, you will need to BPM-enable your application using the business process management features of the SAP NetWeaver?platform. The components SAP Enterprise Portal, SAP Web Application Server and SAP Exchange Infrastructure work together to enable this goal. |