Simplify your SAP integration with API’s and Microservices and participate in the API Economy

I recently read this great Forbes article on the API Economy. The idea that we use specialised service to execute a task makes sense. An analogy is when you build a house or device, you look to different specialists, plumbers for all your piping, electrician for your cabling or for devices, a CPU vendor for the CPU and a memory vendor for your memory. There are a lot of organisations that have exposed API's and in this article, we'll delve into API's and how you can use SAP software to develop API's and participate in the API economy.

When surfing the web, some of the most popular consumer applications have an API to simplify exposing information. Google, eBay, Facebook, Twitter and many more solutions provide API’s to expose data. A great example is Netflix, they have a simple Play API that allows consumers to view content from any device. There is a great article that covers Netflix’s evolutionary API architecture and how they designed their solution to scale. SAP commissioned Forrester to identify the total economic impact of providing an API. The benefits include:

• Significant cost savings from the elimination of errors through data exchange automation
• Shorter mobile development times.
• Data exchange automation efficiency savings

The unquantified benefits include:

• Transitioning from an on-premises platform to a cloud-based API management service reduces costs and increases agility.
• API management enables secure data provisioning
• Improved monitoring and reporting capabilities

  Financially, this meant that the return on investment (ROI) was 303% where the net present value is over €450,000 annually and payback of 2.8 months. Every organisation should develop a plan for an API strategy so they can challenge the status quo. However, API’s have existed for some time and I’ll detail some of my experiences.

 When I first started developing software close to 20 years ago, I knew there was a need to expedite exposing services to simplify integration. I decided to develop a tool to provide this capability. The result was published in a paper and presented at a conference, XML Web Services Automation: A Software Engineering approach. This paper was cited in a patent by Microsoft in their development of the BizTalk product. At that point in time, the production of smartphones was evolving and that made me realise that we need lightweight services for devices to communicate, especially as more devices were web-enabled. A lightweight platform was required to could host these microservices. This project became another publication shortly after and I believe I was one of the first people to coin the term Microservices, Microservices: a lightweight web service infrastructure for mobile devices. This required significant development and most organisations do not have the resources to develop their own framework or tools, rather purchase best of breed tools to assist numerous software solutions to communicate and provide business users visibility of their current business operations. At SAP, we provide a suite of tools to assist with integration and simplify the communication between solutions through the use of exposing or creating API's (Figure 1).

Figure 1: SAP Cloud Integration Suite

The offering that allows customers to simplify integration between SAP and non-SAP systems is the API Business Hub. This is a great resource where you can identify pre-packaged implementation packages to support your integration. One of the more popular integration packages used in Australia (where I am based) is the Single Touch Payroll (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Single Touch Payroll API for Australian Tax Law

These API’s are used to provide End to End Process Integration amongst SAP solutions. In Figure 3, we provide common processes that utilise the API's to communicate between the numerous solutions. Lead to Cash, Total Workforce, Design to Operate and Source to pay are key processes that we have standard API's and integration capabilities to ensure interoperability between our solutions.

Figure 3: E2E Process supplied with API's

 If you are unsure on the protocols or which package to select for integrating your disparate solutions, we provide an offering named Integration Advisor. Integration advisor was developed to support customers to shape their integration strategy. It consists of a collection of typical integration styles and patterns and uses machine learning to identify the right integration pattern based on the customers' environment. This can be used to integrate SAP and non-SAP solutions and we currently have over 1100 registered customers and the list is growing. If you’d like to know more about the Integration Advisor, a blog with greater insight can be read here. 

Another good reason for the use of API's is the ability to execute different processes. On the SAP Cloud Platform, we have numerous services that can be executed including SAP Cloud Platform Workflow, SAP Cloud Platform Business Rules and one of my favourite services, Intelligent Robotic Process Automation. In my previous blog, I covered how we can automate the business process using Intelligent Robotic Process Automation. You can expose your bot as an API, its own microservice that allows a workflow or a business rule to execute your bots after a condition is met (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Exposing an Intelligent Robotic Process Bot as an API

API Management provides an extensive API library and a simple way to expose business services and provide constraints such as call throttling, user restriction or monetising your services. I have used API management to provide a banking wealth API to expose a Fiori and a VR environment (immersive analytics) user experiencing connecting to the same data source (article can be found here). If you’d like to know you more around our API management, please view the link here.

  Other SAP Integration solutions include Data Intelligence that allows you to sequence API’s and includes a Python Notepad so you can use your favourite ML libraries to analyse data (Figure 5) and Open Connectors that are over 170+ standard connectors to non-SAP systems. We still maintain our tools to integrate our on-premise solutions such as process orchestration and the cloud connector to connect your environments. 

Figure 5: An example of Image and Text classification process in Data Intelligence

There are so many options to simplify integration, what else is SAP providing to simplify integration? I was fortunate enough to attend TechED in Las Vegas last year and the team released a simplified API integration tool named SAP Graph. SAP Graph addresses the complexity of having to work with a multitude of APIs when working with applications across the entire SAP Intelligent Suite. Different SAP applications come with different data models, API technologies and authentication types, which cause friction when the APIs of multiple individual software solutions are in use. To give you an idea, there are currently 580+ APIs in the SAP API Hub, which shows the richness of the SAP Intelligent Enterprise. SAP Graph aims to remove these challenges by offering a unified API layer. It offers an API bundle – a set of focussed APIs - that enables developers to use the APIs they need to build extensions for lead-to-cash applications (Figure 6). More information on SAP Graph, there is a blog that explains the tool and how to sign up here.

Figure 6: A visualisation of the SAP Graph solution and data model.

This article provided a high-level overview of API/Microservice solutions developed by SAP, in the next few months I’ll write deeper technical articles to explain how to use these services. I hope this article has been of value and please feel free contact me if you'd like to consider an API strategy for your internal and external systems, we have a team that can support you. I wish you all the best and hope you can either continue or start your API journey to participate in the API Economy.

For this blog to be published, I'd like to thank a few people for the inspiration and review of the article. A huge thanks to Anil Bhaskaran for his views and inspiring me to write this article. To Murali Shanmugham who provided me detailed material and support around the SAP integration story. I'd also like to thank Jamie Fitzcarlos and Gareth Lloyd for proofreading and making sure the content provided can be shared and relevant.