Orchestration Outlook

As we mentioned way back in Chapter 1, SAP Process Orchestration (SAP PO) has a lot of history and has come a long way. SAP is continuously improving the SAP PO product and bringing new and needed features and functionalities. The purpose of this appendix is to update you about other SAP products that are part of the family of on-premise and cloud integration products, or products that can act as a supplement to the functionality provided by SAP PO. Within that context, we’ll explore the SAP API Management platform, SAP Cloud Platform Integration, and Integration Advisor in the next sections.

SAP API Management

As a result of SAP’s partnership with Apigee, SAP is introducing its SAP API Management solution. SAP API Management will make it easier for developers to expose selected functionalities of your organization as application programming interfaces (APIs) to be consumed by a variety of devices or platforms. These APIs are provisioned in a scalable, governed, and secure manner.

SAP API Management will facilitate exposure of SAP and non-SAP data in a uniform way. It will also provide analytics, management, and monitoring of API usage. SAP API Management 1.0 is planned to be released in two different forms: on-premise and cloud-based versions.

Existing services provided by SAP Gateway, SAP PO, and the Enterprise Services Repository (ES Repository) can be leveraged and exposed as an API. The exposed APIs can be RESTful, OData, and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based services.

Going forward, SAP API Management will be even more useful on the cloud. SAP plans to tightly integrate Apigee’s API functionality into the SAP Cloud Platform Integration platform. This functionality will also be made available on premise with the help of SAP PO.

Figure A.1 shows the layers involved in exposing an API from a high-level perspective. It also positions the SAP API Management platform in your environment.

Figure A.1    SAP API Management Positioning