What's the advantage of using Apigee Edge on top of SAP ?

SAP is most popular backend, Why does someone need API Management on top of SAP Backend ? What value would Apigee bring if API Management needed on top of SAP Backend ?

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nmunro
Participant III

Hi @Anil Sagar , @Sesh Ram ,

We use Apigee on top of SAP and to date all of our apigee work has SAP as either the back-end or the client to Apigee proxies.

By way of explaining where Apigee provides advantages, here are some examples of where we use Apigee on top of/with SAP:

Sales reporting/CRM API: Supporting an ipad app for our sales teams providing BI and CRM features

  • For this app we use Apigee as the app's single interface to both SAP BI and Salesforce.com as back-ends
    • In this initiative we also have Apigee sit between SAP ECC and Salesforce.com where we provide master data from SAP to Salesforce.com to support the overall "app platform"
    • The SAP BI data is exposed as SOAP services
    • So, the advantages of Apigee for us are
      • having a single interface for the app to both SAP and salesforce.com
      • A consistent restful-style interface for the app developers
      • We can use Apigee to do things like Salesforce.com callouts as part of requests to the SAP back-end
      • Apigee "infrastructure" features like caching, KVMs, API products (all in one place without us having to re-invent the wheel/spend time on these - we can focus on the business requirements)
      • Traffic management (protecting the SAP back-end; we also used this to prevent errors from Salesforce.com when a mistake caused requests to be made repeatedly in a loop)
      • Control of interfaces during times when BI data is being refreshed
      • Apigee analytics - this has proven to be useful on several occasions for diagnosing problems

Inventory API: Reflecting warehouse inventory changes in SAP that take place in our partner's warehouse on their non-SAP warehouse management system

  • In this initiative we expose SAP via SOAP services and use Apigee to proxy those for our warehouse and logistics partners
    • The advantages here (in addition to those listed above):
      • Basic payload validation
      • We use Apigee to provide an identity API for OAuth (in short, security)

Shipping API: SAP is the client to APIs provided by carriers (e.g. FedEx) so that we can create shipments and labels from within SAP

  • At the time of writing, this is in progress with one carrier but we expect more in future
    • The advantages are:
      • one API for SAP that can (in future) support many carriers - adding additional carriers in Apigee will have a faster development cycle than the same work in SAP
      • simplification of the payload for SAP (as the client) through mediation in Apigee

We have some others in the works but the advantages from using Apigee are largely the same as those above.

Future initiatives are likely to include APIs for our retail and ecommerce - for a business that uses SAP, Apigee with SAP will play a part in those too.

In addition to the above, Apigee also provides the dev portal. We have yet to make full use of this but it remains a key part of our strategy for visibility of our interfaces to SAP (and other systems).

This is for our internal teams both technical and non-technical and, our partners that we expect to use APIs exposed through Apigee.

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Not applicable

This inference is from the conversations I have had with SAP customers. Like any other application, SAP also comprises of several modules which are available to be exposed as APIs. While implementing SAP or doing further development these services are found to be difficult to be identified,packaged and distributed. Apigee helps in coming up with developer friendly API packages for the target audience.

As a stage-0 maturity, this accelerates the kick off of any transformation program.

nmunro
Participant III

Hi @Anil Sagar , @Sesh Ram ,

We use Apigee on top of SAP and to date all of our apigee work has SAP as either the back-end or the client to Apigee proxies.

By way of explaining where Apigee provides advantages, here are some examples of where we use Apigee on top of/with SAP:

Sales reporting/CRM API: Supporting an ipad app for our sales teams providing BI and CRM features

  • For this app we use Apigee as the app's single interface to both SAP BI and Salesforce.com as back-ends
    • In this initiative we also have Apigee sit between SAP ECC and Salesforce.com where we provide master data from SAP to Salesforce.com to support the overall "app platform"
    • The SAP BI data is exposed as SOAP services
    • So, the advantages of Apigee for us are
      • having a single interface for the app to both SAP and salesforce.com
      • A consistent restful-style interface for the app developers
      • We can use Apigee to do things like Salesforce.com callouts as part of requests to the SAP back-end
      • Apigee "infrastructure" features like caching, KVMs, API products (all in one place without us having to re-invent the wheel/spend time on these - we can focus on the business requirements)
      • Traffic management (protecting the SAP back-end; we also used this to prevent errors from Salesforce.com when a mistake caused requests to be made repeatedly in a loop)
      • Control of interfaces during times when BI data is being refreshed
      • Apigee analytics - this has proven to be useful on several occasions for diagnosing problems

Inventory API: Reflecting warehouse inventory changes in SAP that take place in our partner's warehouse on their non-SAP warehouse management system

  • In this initiative we expose SAP via SOAP services and use Apigee to proxy those for our warehouse and logistics partners
    • The advantages here (in addition to those listed above):
      • Basic payload validation
      • We use Apigee to provide an identity API for OAuth (in short, security)

Shipping API: SAP is the client to APIs provided by carriers (e.g. FedEx) so that we can create shipments and labels from within SAP

  • At the time of writing, this is in progress with one carrier but we expect more in future
    • The advantages are:
      • one API for SAP that can (in future) support many carriers - adding additional carriers in Apigee will have a faster development cycle than the same work in SAP
      • simplification of the payload for SAP (as the client) through mediation in Apigee

We have some others in the works but the advantages from using Apigee are largely the same as those above.

Future initiatives are likely to include APIs for our retail and ecommerce - for a business that uses SAP, Apigee with SAP will play a part in those too.

In addition to the above, Apigee also provides the dev portal. We have yet to make full use of this but it remains a key part of our strategy for visibility of our interfaces to SAP (and other systems).

This is for our internal teams both technical and non-technical and, our partners that we expect to use APIs exposed through Apigee.

This is super cool @Neil Munro & Absolutely great information. Thank you for taking your valuable time & sharing the same with Apigee community. I am sure this is helpful for many others.

Awesome @Neil Munro. Thanks for sharing 🙂

alan
Participant III

Another use case that we have implemented at a retailer is mirroring data in SAP hana into API BaaS. SAP Hana turns out isn't optimized of significant # of concurrent reads.

SAP is a partner of Apigee, and we have been through many joint implementations together.