Motivation

SAP Process Orchestration supports custom process applications and integration scenarios for a lot of SAP customers. It evolved over many years to a very stable and feature rich integration solution. Because of changing business requirements and your IT strategy, it could be a good idea to check, if SAP Integration Suite supports your processes and integration requirements better?

If you consider moving to Integration Suite, you might asks yourself what is the best time to start a project for your migration? To find an answer for it, I asked Chat GPT (https://chat.openai.com/chat):

When is the best time to migrate from SAP PO to SAP Integration Suite?

SAP PO (SAP Process Orchestration) is a legacy product that has been replaced by SAP Integration Suite, which is a part of SAP Cloud Platform Integration. If you are still using SAP PO, you should consider migrating to SAP Integration Suite as soon as possible to take advantage of the newer and more powerful capabilities it offers. There are a few factors you should consider when deciding when to migrate:

• Support: SAP PO will reach end of mainstream maintenance in 2027, after which SAP will no longer provide support for the product. If you rely on SAP PO for critical business processes, it is important to migrate to SAP Integration Suite before this date to ensure ongoing support.
• Capabilities: SAP Integration Suite offers a number of enhancements and new features that are not available in SAP PO, such as support for microservices and event-driven architectures, integration with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Platform, and integration with external cloud services.
• Migrating to SAP Integration Suite will allow you to take advantage of these capabilities. Costs: Running SAP PO can be more expensive than SAP Integration Suite due to maintenance and support costs. Migrating to SAP Integration Suite can help you reduce your overall IT costs.

In general, it is a good idea to migrate from SAP PO to SAP Integration Suite as soon as possible to take advantage of the newer capabilities and reduce your risk of being unsupported in the future.

What are the challenges when migrating from SAP PO to SAP Integration Suite?

There are a few challenges that you may encounter when migrating from SAP PO to SAP Integration Suite:

• Complexity: Migrating from SAP PO to SAP Integration Suite involves moving from a monolithic, on-premises integration platform to a cloud-based, microservices-based platform. This can be a complex process, especially if you have a large number of integration flows and a complex system landscape.
• Compatibility: SAP PO and SAP Integration Suite use different technologies and architectures, which can make it challenging to migrate existing integration flows. You may need to redesign and re-implement some or all of your integration flows to work with SAP Integration Suite.
• Testing: It is important to thoroughly test your integration flows after migrating to SAP Integration Suite to ensure that they are working correctly. This can be a time-consuming process, especially if you have a large number of integration flows.
• Training: SAP Integration Suite uses different technologies and architectures than SAP PO, so your team may need to learn how to use the new platform. This can require time and resources to train your team and get them up to speed.

Overall, migrating from SAP PO to SAP Integration Suite can be a complex and time-consuming process, but it is necessary to take advantage of the newer capabilities and reduce your risk of being unsupported in the future. It is important to plan and execute the migration carefully to ensure a smooth transition.

Benefits of Integration Suite

SAP outlines some benefits why customers should migrate and transform with SAP BTP  / Integration Suite:

• SAP Integration Suite provides the flexibility and independence you need by delivering technology to move assets to the cloud, integrate the IT landscape, and configure and extend SAP and third-party applications.
• Achieve seamless business processes: Integrate processes and data across diverse application landscapes and business networks with comprehensive integration capabilities.
  Accelerate business outcomes: Quickly integrate and connect any application or business partner with thousands of pre-built integrations using a proven methodology based on 50 years of SAP best practices.
• Modernize integration: Enable self-service integration at scale with simpler tools, built-in AI, and modern integration capabilities. Deploy to any cloud with trust and security fully managed by SAP.

SAP Assessment and Migration Tool

It was possible to move to Integration Suite in a “manual way” by migration SAP PI /PO IFlows and ICos to Integration Flows in CPI (former name of Cloud Integration) since years. By January 23 SAP released their SAP Assessment and Migration Tool to support migration projects. So is a migration from SAP PO to Integration Suite now a “click of a button”? I think that is with the current version of the solution not possible, because some functionality is missing and a migration of the complete content will not be possible and sometime does not make sense. But you get a good overview on your integration content in SAP Process Orchestration with a rough estimation of your effort to move to Integration Suite.

The first step will be to connect you SA PO system via Cloud Connector in the Migration Assessment tool like described in SAP Help.

After that you can start with extracting data from your system

Extract Data in SAP Assessment Tool

When the extraction job is finished, you can create a based on the data via:

Scenario Evaluation

This will show you a nice dashboard, but also the opportunity to download the results via Excel or PDF.

Dashboard

Download Results

The next steps will be to evaluate the results and estimation and perhaps identify some scenarios, where you will have some quick wins or easy to migrate ones. If there are special requirements from your side, you can check the rules in the settings section.

If you identified some flows, you would like to migrate, you are able to directly start with the Migration Tool. That is not designed as central tool with a central dashboard to push content to Cloud Integration but more as pulling flows from SAP PO to specific packages in Cloud Integration. So first of all, create a new package and the click on “Migrate”:

Migrate in Cloud Integration

After selecting a flow and some more clicks, you migrated your fist flow from SAP PP to Cloud Integration

fist migrated flow

For sure, you can do the migration manually, but at the end a tool does it in a reproducible und save way. There are some restrictions today, so that you need to do some adjustments manually. To make it more and more sures, I would suggest doing at least some testing and send feedback to SAP in case of issues or missing features. Some generic ideas and information’s can we found here.

Please keep in mind, that there is no status update for migrated flows today. So consider to mark them in PO in an appropriate way.

Integration Suite vs. Cloud Integration

Integration became more complex in comparison that was there, when SAP PO was designed. So I think a migration from SAP PO to Cloud Integration is not the while story: There are much more capabilities in Integration and it makes sense to perhaps rethink the implemented scenarios and to migrate from SAP PO to Integration Suite, e.g. to:

• add a central API proxy as entry point for more security or a better developer experience
• use Event Mesh for high volume interface or to implement loose coupling
• implement a CAP service for some central logic, that could be reused.

Unit, Integration and Regression Testing

In migration projects the implementation takes time, but typically testing is a a big block where you need integration and business experts. Because business experts have a lot do what delivers more values than doing tests manually, it could be very a booster for your project to automate testing as much as possible:

• Unit test manually via simulation and test tool
• Integration testing via INT4 Shield with PO and Cloud Integration in one step
• Use integration tests for regressions tests also after migration project

If you don’t have solutions in place for that, consider to use the 12 month free license of the Figaf tool or the INT4 Shield.

Migration Approaches

When thinking a bit on migration options or strategies, I find a analogy to S/4 projects very interesting:

• Brownfield conversion: More or less try to copy/migrate as much as possible content from SAP PO to Cloud Integration without changing the logic of implemented integrations. This could be a good option in case of many standard integrations or if are not able to change thing e.g. because of keeping migration costs low.
• Selective: Copy the mass of interface in an intelligent way and implement changes, where it brings quick wins e.g. by using more flexible functionality compared to SAP PO. One idea could be to implement a API security and load balancing layer or to document your interfaces via API Hub Business Portal (OpenAPI)
• Greenfield: Start with ISA-M process to design your Integration landscape of the future. After that, build some interfaces based on the new guidelines, learn about the new capabilities and how to handle them in live production. With these experiences build packages of interfaces and migrate them in waves to Integration. Perhaps you can use the best of PO and Integration for a while to have a smooth migration?

Migration project steps / phases

Perhaps we can reuse SAP Activate for our migration projects?

• Discover: The outcome of the Discover phase is to lean about the new Integration Suite capabilities an do define your Integration approach. Also, a basic documentation of your landscape should be ready afterwards.
• Prepare: The outcome of the SAP Prepare phase is to setup the Assessment tool (see above) and to run the assessment on your SAP PO system(s). You should analyse the results in detail regarding effort and what is possible to migration automatically. During the Prepare phase, SAP or enterprise architects will build a business case for migration, which outlines the benefits and reasons for migrating from SAP PO to Integration Suite.
• Explore: A change impact analysis will be completed to understand how Integration Suite will benefit the business and integration team. This outcome of the Explore phase is to enable a smooth transition to the new system.
• Realize: SAP functional consultants and business users will work together to ensure the objects in Integration Suite are delivered within the timeline and to a high standard. Once all the deliverables are satisfied, a cutover plan is made to move the configurations.
• Deploy: The outcome of the Deploy phase is to migrate the interfaces to Integration Suite so that customers and partners can benefit from the new capabilities while continuing to receive support in case of problems or concerns.
• Run: The main task for consultants during the Run phase is to keep up to date with the latest innovation and technologies in SAP as part of the product’s “Continued Learning” philosophy. Once the transformed integration landscape is up and running, the focus shifts to continuous improvement and risk management.

Quo Vadis – Start your SAP PO to Integration Suite Migration now?

So finally, what to do? Start now? Migrate everything in one step? Or do it step by step? What is the best way to do it and what is the best target architecture?

I think I makes sense nearly for every customer to START NOW, because:

• we now have the tools form SAP in GA
• there are quick wins by Integration Suite nearly for every scenario
• it is a complex project, that takes time and will be become more difficult, when starting at the end of SAP PO lifetime

For sure, there are still missing capabilities in the Migration- and Assessment tool and also in Integration Suite (compared to SAP PO). That’s we I would suggest starting now, to migrate what makes sense in you landscape and to use the power of SAP PO and Integration perhaps for a certain time until needed features are available.

What are your ideas on migration from SAP PO to Integration Suite? Do you already have first experiences? Would it be a good idea to build a community book with tips and tips or FAQs?

Also check out the SAP documentation of the new tools for more detail.