Turn your ERP into a Team Player: Introducing SAP Integration Suite, advanced ev...

How soccer explains the IT world

Have you experienced these moments when you hear a single sentence – and this sentence sums up things better than anything you could have come up with? That moment in respect to event-driven architecture took place on Tuesday for me.

I had been presenting to an American Fortune 500 customer on SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh and I had come up with this new slide wrapping up the advantages of event-driven architecture, comparing an EDA to team sports.

This comparison is in the end quite obvious since soccer players for example act loosely coupled while always knowing what is going on around them (situational awareness is the buzzword here) and ideally notifying each other in real time about their plans and actions. I will never forget my friend Jason always shouting “Chattanooga” whenever he wanted to play a long ball. Usually worked out well.

In order to win, players need to act as a team. And in order to act as a team, they need situational awareness. You can replace soccer with your favourite team sport here – ice hockey, basketball, football, rugby. You pick. It’s the same story. It is about situational awareness and teamwork. Talent wins games, teamwork wins championships.

Now transfer this to your SAP landscape – wouldn’t it be great if your SAP S/4HANA system would inform your SAP Business Technology Platform and your SAP ECC system in real time of changes that are important? Of significant changes? Or even beyond your SAP landscape, if your SAP S/4HANA system would inform your Microsoft Teams of significant changes in real time.

My customer did this transfer in human real time and worded it close to perfect:

I want my ERP to be a team player!

I simply love this sentence. It sums things up so well.

Let’s make the next step: what do you need for that? In order to turn your ERP into a team player, you need an event-enabled backend, suitable event consumers and you need the appropriate infrastructure to transport and distribute your events: an event broker or event mesh.

So far SAP Event Mesh has been SAP’s single offering in this space. Lately, beginning of August 2022 to be exact, we have added SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh to our portfolio. Advanced Event Mesh will complement SAP Event Mesh for more demanding scenarios and offer a highly sophisticated feature set.

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is a fully managed event streaming and management service that enables enterprise-wide and enterprise-grade event-driven architecture. It complements SAP Event Mesh for more demanding scenarios and is a full blown, general purpose Event Mesh.

What is Advanced Event Mesh?

Advanced Event Mesh is a distributed mesh of event brokers that can be deployed across environments
It offers a full purpose set of eventing services covering all relevant use cases
AEM supports event streaming, event management and event monitoring
Brokers fully scale as required and come in T-shirt sizes to perfectly fit your needs

Advanced Event Mesh Cockpit

What features and benefits does AEM offer?

AEM offers enterprise-grade performance, reliability, security and governance.
It scales to very large use cases – and very means very very very in this case. On the other hand, you can start small, if needed, as well.
SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh offers deployment options across different hyperscalers and in private cloud environments. All it takes is a Kubernetes environment.
AEM can be configured to form a distributed mesh of event brokers deployed across environments in private or public clouds. Events can flow across the mesh to be consumed where desired.
It includes a sophisticated toolset to address all relevant tasks.
SAP Integration Suite integrates with SAP backends via different options

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh in ten short statements

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh

is a general purpose, multi-site EDA platform and portal
allows for SAP to SAP, SAP to Everything and Everything to Everything scenarios
supports distributed networks of event brokers deployed in different clouds and on-premises
can be deployed in your cloud of choice or in your on premises K8S
provides sophisticated authentication and security features like Kerberos, OAuth or TLS
offers fine-grained filtering options
allows for real-time monitoring, capacity insights and distributed tracing
provides support for all relevant protocols like JMS, REST, AMQP and MQTT, plus SMF.
allows to start small and upgrade to bigger T-shirt sizes when your business grows
provides an outstanding performance up to billions of events per day

Use Cases? Think Event Network!

You can think of Advanced Event Mesh as an event network. It is ideal for real-time high availability use cases: event distribution, event-driven integration, event-driven extensions of business applications, microservices and real time applications.

Advanced Event Mesh is a highly valuable addition to SAP’s event-driven ecosystem and will allow you to target globally distributed, high load use cases complementing SAP Event Mesh for more demanding scenarios.