Episode 2 : SAP Graph API

Second part of "Two Minutes Quick SAP Business Technology and Cloud Architecture Series"

Want to use SAP Intelligent Enterprise data through a standardized and already-modeled approach in your applications, extensions and integrations? -> Be an early adapter to SAP Graph..

Motivation for SAP Graph

SAP's landscape of solutions is very complex. When it comes to data gathering, providing this data to your applications and third parties; it is even harder with the old methods. Sometimes even using a small piece of data becomes a nightmare as it requires many skills for development & integration because many systems can involve in the process. Therefore it's necessary to have an approach to easily access data in a simple method regardless of where it resides ..This is where SAP Graph API comes into play.

• ?What .. is it?

SAP says, SAP Graph is the easy-to-use API for the data of the Intelligent Enterprise from SAP. It provides an intuitive programming model that you can use to easily build new extensions and applications using SAP data.

With the abstraction of different solution data structures or physical landscape, SAP Graph simplifies the requesting and gathering of data easier from a single point. While doing this utilizes SAP's One Domain model which is SAP's simplified and consolidated data model for its Intelligent Enterprise( that I will explain later in the episodes.)

• ?Who .. to use it?

Your developers can access your data(which is modeled from a business perspective) over SAP Graph APIs which is acting as a middle-man (but a generic and standardized one) regardless of where it resides.

• ?How.. to use it?

SAP Official Documentation says "An API sandbox with a limited feature set is publicly available for everyone.

Additional features are currently available as a private beta shipment. The registration for the beta phase is currently closed, but you can sign up for the newsletter and stay tuned for more news!"

Meanwhile, you can try SAP Graph from the sandbox system and your developers can call this APIs from their applications and / or extensions, integrations etc.

• ?What is the difference? (SAP API Business Hub & SAP Graph)

Below is the simplified description of the difference among two

SAP API Business Hub (api.sap.com) is the central catalog of APIs from SAP and selected partners for application developers to search, discover, test and consume these APIs to build extensions or integrations using SAP BTP.

SAP Graph on the other hand is providing curated and unified APIs that expose core data and functionality for the Intelligent Enterprise. It is meant to enable partners, the ecosystem, SAP developers and customers to create applications (apps on the edge) along SAP's core Intelligent Enterprise processes.

• Where.. to see more?

Check https://explore.graph.sap/ for updates

• ?What is next?

Talking about the data.. Regardless of which system you gather your SAP data in a complex environment, SAP provides you a consolidated data model of its intelligent suite of products in a logical structure. -> Lets have a look at SAP One Domain Model for the next episodes..

Last words

Graph concept is not unique to SAP as a vendor, however with the business domain knowledge, SAP has decided to make life easier for business to express their requirements, and developers to easily understand the data and access it while developing their application from.a single point.?

Although it is still in the exploratory stage, the idea is very promising: We(will) have multiple solutions holding the same or similar data in different structures, but in the end of the day a "Customer Order" should become the same entity regardless of the system(some part may be in S/4HANA, some other in SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud). So while developing applications why call it with a different name, with a different method, multiple times and consolidate again and again?

What you need is a good architecture and utilizing the API that SAP Graph provides you.?

Check for the other parts of the series

• Episode 1- What is SAP API Business Hub in two minutes