What is SAP integration?

More than 400,000 businesses around the world use SAP to touch 77% of the world’s transactions. SAP’s enterprise application software can be incredibly powerful for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management or financial management. But to get the most out of SAP software, it needs to be seamlessly connected and integrated with the rest of your business. SAP integration connects the data in SAP to the data in systems throughout your organization.

While an IT team can manually create connections between SAP and other systems through code, the vast majority of businesses use what is called an integration platform. Using an integration platform allows IT teams to configure these connections instead of coding them, and allows them to monitor everything closely to make sure the data is flowing properly to and from SAP systems.

There are lots of integration platforms on the market. Be sure to look for a platform that offers SAP integration as part of their core offerings—from services to “recipes”—so that you won’t end up building those connections yourself. The extra dev time to create the integrations is a hidden cost to some of the lesssophisticated platforms.

You should also look for a platform that allows developers to configure SAP integrations without prior knowledge of SAP data structures required. This will help reduce both headaches and time to value for your IT team.

In terms of platform reliability, you can turn to outside analysts to determine which integration platforms rank well in terms of performance and capabilities.

Software AG’s webMethods is an API integration platform that enables you to integrate anything with everything, connecting to any system or application silo with plug-and-play ease. It makes connecting systems seamless, easy and agile—including SAP systems.

webMethods provides an easy-to-use tool that is widelyconsidered one of the strongest solutions for SAP integration, especially in heterogeneous environments.

This SAP integration solution provides:

• 50+ built-in services and 20+ recipes out of the box
• Cost-effective integration for SAP customers who want to integrate non-SAP applications and trading partners with components of their SAP architecture
• Broad support for established and emerging Web services, e-business and technology standards
• Separate views for developers and business analysts
• Easy integration without the need for recoding

With the webMethods SAP integration solution, you can:

• Eliminate application silos through SAP integration with custom, packaged and mainframe applications and databases
• Speed implementation and connection between your SAP and non-SAP solutions
• Reduce implementation and operating costs
• Rely on the proven performance of the webMethods platform
• Lower risks by leveraging your development investment
• Reduce the cost of integrating applications by limiting complex point-to-point connections
• Improve time-to-market by re-sing existing assets
• Enable enterprise mobile apps to access SAP data and functionality
• Improve enterprise data quality by ensuring single version and reference data are consumed by SAP and other enterprise application.

SAP^® is registered trademark of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries.