Foreword

In recent years, SAP has released a number of products to cover the roles of enterprise service bus, business rules engine, and business process engine. In 2012, SAP launched another product: SAP Process Orchestration. SAP Process Orchestration combines the power of multiple products (such as SAP Business Process Management [BPM], SAP Process Integration [PI], and SAP Business Rules Management [BRM]) into one single product running on the Java stack. This consolidated product brings numerous advantages to assist organizations in automating their business processes and their integration requirement needs, including (but not limited to) the following:

• Consolidated installation and monitoring
• Simpler landscape
• Features that support business process automation and integration
• Bridging the process modeling gap between the business and IT
• Lower cost of ownership

A few books have been written in the past to cover different aspects of the SAP middleware landscape, but none of these other books has taken a holistic approach that covers all three main components of SAP PO in a single book. That is what this practical combo book, SAP Process Orchestration: The Comprehensive Guide, does. The book explains how all the tools available in the SAP PO offering can be used to model different kinds of integration scenarios. The covered scenarios range from simple ones that only run on SAP PI, to more complex ones that utilize SAP BPM to coordinate complex flows and SAP BRM to enable flexible business process customizing.

In addition to providing a detailed explanation of the tools mentioned previously with the support of step-by-step examples, this book also explores some of the latest features released by SAP. The authors of the book have a lot of experience and a deep understanding of the subject matter, and they have taken the opportunity to address many other commonly asked questions, including the following:

• How do you migrate from a dual stack to single Java stack installation?
• How do you set up the landscape for transporting Java objects?
• What are the best practices in the SAP PO space?
• What is the possible future of the SAP middleware products combined with SAP Cloud Platform Integration?
• What should you consider when setting up an SAP PO landscape?

John and Roberto have gone above and beyond by providing exercises and solutions to help you practice and gain hands-on experience. This book is a must-read for any SAP integration consultant who wants to gain a deep understanding of the topic and to be able to support SAP PO implementations on an outstanding level.

Michal Krawczyk
SAP Mentor
SAP PI/SAP PO book author
Eight times SCN Topic Leader in SAP PI/SAP PO
SAP Integration Expert at int4.com