Next Generation Process Integration - This was a session that found a lot of eager faces in Berlin, anxiously waiting for the future to unravel, the future of SAP PI as we know it as of today.
A huge thumbs up to SAP in organizing this session. I am sure all of us who attended was benefited by the insights and those lovely screenshots of PI from the future.
The take away for me has been the following;
1. The future is Java - Eventually we will see the ABAP stack disappear. So with that in mind, give away with your ABAP mappings. Try to model all your mappings on the graphical editor, XSLT or Java only. If one thing SAP has made clear this year is, then its the Java only future of PI.
2. Eclipse based Editors - SAP will look towards bring the ESR and ID into NWDS based perspective. I dont think the message here is that SAP will give away with the current Swing based ESR and ID but the step here is to provide additional ways to access the ESR and ID.
3. Graphical modeling of end to end scenarios - With a concept that SAP currently calls Integration flows, there will be a single concept to work with the TCD life cycle. This will be a graphical representation of an interface process flow (kind of a mix of both the Integration scenario and Configuration scenario?. There would be provisions of templates and patterns. The objective is to reduce the total cost of development and simplify PI as of today.
4. Reduced TCO - By enabling a better integration with Sol. Man and centralizing PI monitoring of multiple PI domains this is a major step towards reducing TCO. We can look forwards to see a much better alerting and a better control on the alert inbox. Message alerting will find investment and options to configure and optimize the alert framework, rules etc will find predominance. Enhancements to the User defined Message Search on the payload is also something worth looking forward to (sneak peak already in 7.3).
5. System Centric Process Support - SAP claims to simplify the ccBPM. This will mean the introduction of BPMN as a standard. Once the ABAP stack ceases to exist, NW BPM will be plugged into PI for ccBPM scenarios. SAP will try to make available a lot more of integration process patterns readily available with PI. But the downside of this is that there is no easy migration of the existing BPEL based ccBPM to BPMN.
There were many more interesting tit bits. So if you want to know more, I strongly recommend the session, 'A Deep Dive into the Next Generation Process Integration' at other upcoming TechEds.
