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richard_hirsch
Active Contributor


This weekend during a search for other topics, I found a group of newly released documentation about the upcoming HANA Cloud Integration offering.  Previously, documentation on the offering’s data integration capabilities was available but now there is also documentation on the offering’s process integration capabilities

The following documents are now present:

Release Overview and Security Features

Overview of process integration capabilities and security

Installation Information

Information about installing and configuring the features of SAP HANA Cloud Integration Tools on the Eclipse platform. Here is the description of these tools:

SAP HANA Cloud Integration facilitates the integration of business processes, and data across on-premise and cloud applications. You can access the functionalities of SAP HANA Cloud Integration by installing the Designer and Operations features on the Eclipse platform. The tools in the Designer feature allow you to model and configure integration flows for connecting business applications. The tools in the Operations feature allow you to administer and operate the runtime components, and monitor the message exchange at runtime.

Operations Guide

Information about operating SAP HANA Cloud Integration runtime components and monitoring the message exchange

Developer's Guide - Managing Integration Content

Information about accessing integration content provided by SAP and developing your own integration content

More interesting is that it appears that it is now possible to download the Eclipse-based software and try it out.

Points of Interest

Open Source

I’ve always been curious as to what the technological basis of the HANA Cloud Integration (HCI) offering would include.  Regarding in the documentation, there are some hints I found:

In the content area of the Aggregated Data view, the following information is displayed:

● Integration flow ID/Camel ID

● Exchanges Total: Displays the total number of messages exchanged via a Camel route.

● Exchanges Failed: Displays number of failed message exchanged via a Camel route.

● Mean Processing Time: Displays the mean processing time for a successful message exchanged via a Camel route. [SOURCE]

My assumption is that these references point to Apache Camel:

Apache Camel is a rule-based routing and mediation engine which provides a Java object-based implementation of the Enterprise Integration Patterns using an API (or declarative Java Domain Specific Language) to configure routing and mediation rules. The domain-specific language means that Apache Camel can support type-safe smart completion of routing rules in an integrated development environment using regular Java code without large amounts of XML configuration files, though XML configuration inside Spring is also supported. [SOURCE]

If my interpretation of this reference is correct, then I’m pleased to see the usage of open-source software in this environment.

SuccessFactors Adapter

One of the main scenarios for HANA Cloud Integration is the integration of the cloud-based SuccessFactors with OnPremise assets.

I found various references to SuccessFactors adapters:

SFSF Adapter Monitoring: Identifies a sub system that provides services to

monitor the SuccessFactor connector (SFSF adapter) [SOURCE]

Select this option when you want to specity user credentials for usage of the SuccessFactory adapter. In that case, in addition to user and password, you also have to specify a company code. [SOURCE]

This adapter may be connected to the prepackaged integration content that is also available.

The current version of SAP HANA Cloud Integration is available for customers and partners as an Application Edition, especially for a dedicated set of SAP OnDemand solutions (SAP Customer OnDemand, SuccessFactors BizX, SAP Financial Services Network). Upon purchase, predefined, ready-to-use prepackaged integration content can be made available by SAP without the immediate need for additional hardware or integration skills on  the customer’s side. This drastically reduces integration project lead times and lowers resource consumption significantly. [SOURCE]

Multi-Tenant support


Multiple tenants are supported via tenant isolation:

SAP HANA Cloud Integration is designed so that the involved virtual machines are strictly separated from each other with regard to the related participants. In other words, separate resources (memory, CPU, and file system)  of the cloud-based integration platform are allocated to each participant – although all participants might share the same hardware. In addition, each tenant uses a separate database schema, which guarantees that the data of the different participants is strictly separated. This separation is also referred to as tenant isolation. [SOURCE]

Association with OnPremise Assets

One of the most interesting features is the ability to reuse existing on-premise content (message mappings / operation mappings / XSLT based mappings) from an SAP Enterprise Services Repository [SOURCE]. This is a very important feature and will greatly improve the ability of existing PI partners to move to the new environment.

REST Support

Currently, HCI supports the following Connectivity Options:

Option

Description

SFTP client adapter

This enables you to use Secure Shell File Transfer

Protocol (SSH File Transfer Protocol, abbreviated to

SFTP).

IDoc (IDoc SOAP) adapter

Enables you to set up reliable communication of IDoc

XML documents via SOAP/HTTPS with enabled back

ends of the SAP Business Suite

SOAP adapter

Enables you to exchange SOAP messages between

remote clients or Web service servers and SAP HANA

Cloud Integration.

If you look at other cloud integration vendors (such as Boomi), REST is supported.  I wonder if Camel’s REST support might be able to use to support REST calls in the new environment. 

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