Isam Integration

[Hortense Malovich]

SAPIntegration Solution Advisory Methodology offers a comprehensive framework that helps accelerate hybrid integration platform design, safeguard integration projects based on SAP best practices, and enable an agile integration practice across your organization.

The Integration Assessment capability within SAP Integration Suite automates SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology. You can shape, document, and govern your organization's integration technology strategy by applying SAP integration technology recommendations.

ISA-M is a methodology offered by SAP that helps enterprise architects define an integration strategy for their organizations and derive related integration guidelines. Introduced in 2014, ISA-M has been successfully applied by numerous global organizations and is constantly adapted based on customer feedback. It includes a set of technology-agnostic integration use case patterns that can be mapped to integration technologies in a customer context. This article provides an overview of ISA-M and uses a detailed example to demonstrate how enterprise architects can use the methodology based on a phased approach to create a hybrid integration platform that supports both SAP and non-SAP integration technologies.

ISA-M is designed to help enterprise architects address four common challenges they typically face when designing an overall integration strategy for their organizations (see Figure 1):

ISA-M provides a collection of typical integration patterns for process-, data-, user-, and IoT-centric integration scenarios. These patterns are technology agnostic and can be mapped to integration technologies or services depending on the specific customer context, which together constitute a customer-specific, hybrid integration platform. Enterprise architects apply the methodology to define and enable this platform using a four-phase ISA-M process cycle.

To help enterprise architects assess their integration strategy, the ISA-M template provides a holistic overview of typical integration domains in a hybrid landscape (see Figure 3). Integration domains are technology agnostic and describe areas in a hybrid landscape where integration might be needed depending on the customer context. They can be used as a starting point to document a hybrid landscape and to perform a first scoping of the relevant integration areas. For example, customers can perform an assessment by selecting integration domains that are relevant for their organization or that they might want to further evaluate, for instance, as future building blocks. As ISA-M itself is extensible, customers can adapt integration domains to their specific needs. Note that in addition to supporting Phase 1, integration domains play a key role in Phase 2 when defining integration guidelines.

After the high-level scoping of integration domains, enterprise architects can select the integration use case patterns that are relevant to their organizations. ISA-M includes four integration styles that cover key integration archetypes (see Figure 4). The process integration style connects business processes across applications, while the data integration style allows data access and synchronization across applications. The user integration style connects user-centric applications (such as mobile apps) with applications, while the thing integration style connects real-world objects (such as sensors and machines) with applications.

Each integration style can be refined by use case patterns that describe typical integration use cases in enterprise landscapes. Cross use case patterns encompass all integration-related use cases that complement one or more of the four core integration styles. For example, the API-managed integration pattern provides full lifecycle management for application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be leveraged in user- or process-centric integration scenarios, for instance. All integration styles and use case patterns are technology agnostic and are applicable within multiple integration domains, such as in the cloud, on premise, or in hybrid scenarios.

Figure 6 is an example blueprint of a hybrid integration platform that has been derived and abstracted from some real customer cases. The platform is hybrid in multiple dimensions: it covers multiple integration styles, multiple connected endpoints, and multiple integration domains, and supports multiple integration personas or roles. The integration technologies depicted in this example include SAP as well as non-SAP components, and they are complemented by supporting elements such as an API catalog, monitoring, integration automation, operations, and security.

Through its business technology platform, SAP provides a holistic integration technology portfolio that covers all the integration use case patterns introduced in the previous section. Next, we will look at how SAP technology can be used to support the hybrid integration platform shown in the example, with a particular focus on the process and data integration styles, since these are core to an integration scenario. While here we focus on SAP technologies, since these are core to many organizations, remember that it would also be possible to include non-SAP or open source components in the hybrid integration platform.

SAP Cloud Platform Integration and SAP Process Orchestration are complementary solutions for supporting the process integration style: SAP Cloud Platform Integration covers cloud and hybrid integration domains while SAP Process Orchestration is primarily used for the on-premise integration domain. Here, we focus on SAP Cloud Platform Integration to support the hybrid scenario.

SAP Cloud Platform Integration provides a comprehensive IPaaS. It consists of a modular set of integration services that support a wide variety of integration use case patterns. These services include the SAP Cloud Platform Integration service, which supports the integration of SAP and non-SAP applications in the cloud and on premise (application to application), including integration with business partners (business to business) and government agencies (business to government). To realize out-of-the-box integration for SAP-to-SAP scenarios, SAP provides prepackaged content in SAP API Business Hub that can be deployed on the SAP Cloud Platform Integration service.

The SAP Cloud Platform API Management service provides full lifecycle management for APIs, including design and runtime governance, which allows organizations to create simple, connected digital experiences for consumers, partners, and employees. To support the openness of SAP applications, the SAP Cloud Platform Open Connectors service aims to simplify connectivity to third-party applications and accelerate integration by providing prebuilt, feature-rich connectors to over 170 non-SAP applications. The SAP Cloud Platform Integration Advisor service enables accelerated governance of message implementation and mapping guidelines, leveraging machine learning and crowdsourcing mechanisms, and the SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Messaging service supports event-driven integrations with messaging.

Figure 7 shows an example of an integration flow (exposed on SAP API Business Hub) that can be deployed on the SAP Cloud Platform Integration service: it shows the integration of SAP Commerce Cloud (part of SAP C/4HANA) with SAP S/4HANA where orders from SAP C/4HANA are sent to SAP S/4HANA for further processing as part of an overall lead-to-cash process. This integration flow outlines a typical example for the process integration style that connects business processes across applications and guarantees transactional process integrity.

The SAP Data Intelligence cloud service supports the data integration style. The example hybrid integration platform includes SAP Data Hub, which is a part of SAP Data Intelligence. SAP Data Hub provides data pipelining, governance, and landscape management of diverse data across distributed data landscapes. A metadata catalog provides the governance to get the right data to the right user, in the right context, at the right time.

In the example hybrid integration platform, SAP HANA smart data integration is included as an additional building block for the data integration style. SAP HANA smart data integration handles all data integration scenarios and should be used for ETL and real-time ETL in SAP HANA-centric system landscapes. SAP Data Hub can leverage SAP HANA smart data integration within a data orchestration scenario, making the technologies complementary.

So, when do you use which? SAP Cloud Platform Integration and SAP Data Intelligence are complementary offerings that target specific integration use cases with their specific integration capabilities. While the decision is highly dependent on the particular customer context, Figure 9 provides enterprise architects some overall guidance on when it makes sense to use each offering.

Based on the design of the hybrid integration platform, enterprise architects can attach blueprints to selected use case patterns that outline the involved components and their interactions. These architecture blueprints can then be used by project teams for consistent implementation and documentation of integration scenarios.

Figure 10 shows a sample architecture blueprint for the digital integration hub use case pattern. With this emerging use case pattern, customers can reduce the cost and complexity of enabling API access to data held in system-of-record applications for large-scale, high-performance scenarios. By storing an aggregated snapshot of the system-of-record data needed by the channel applications, this pattern protects the system of record from excessive workloads while optimizing the data access latency and responsiveness for modern digital applications.

The example outlines how this use case pattern can be implemented using the services of SAP Cloud Platform Integration. Data from the back end is replicated into SAP Cloud Platform, which provides high-performance access through the SAP Cloud Platform API Management service and, in turn, decouples the front-end APIs from the back end (SAP S/4HANA, for example). Updates can be processed by the SAP Cloud Platform Integration service, which integrates with the relevant back-end and cloud applications. In addition, business events can be processed by the SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Messaging service, which leads to updates in the SAP HANA database. Third-party applications can be integrated into this pattern using the SAP Cloud Platform Open Connectors service.

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