Executive Summary
- Integration with SAP is often expensive and time-consuming for vendors.
- Our SAP Integration Ninja takes care of all integration needs vendors with SAP customers.
Introduction
In this article, we will cover the unique benefits of the SAP Integration Ninja for software vendors.
The Reality of Integration Vendors
Most of the vendors involved in SAP integration do not offer integration as a service. Integration vendors ranging from Informatica to Boomi to Mulesoft are focused on selling software and having the customer implement the integration software. This is similar to SAP with PO (Process Orchestration). SAP wants to sell software and then let all of the responsibilities fall to the customer.
The problem is that this eliminates the potential for many to many efficiencies and the central maintenance of the adapter.
How The SAP Integration Ninja Works for Vendors Seeking to Integrate to SAP
Vendors that want to integrate to SAP are often unwanted overhead for vendors and because of how vendors design their adapters.
However, with the SAP Integration, Ninja provides the following benefits.
Benefit #1: Time to Market and Time to Go Live
The time to market and go live at customers is much faster than the vendor’s homegrown based adapters.
This is because of the advantages of our architecture and the ability to bring new vendors online. The SAP Integration Ninja can be adjusted per the individual customer.
Benefit #2: Less Maintenance
Creating and maintaining one’s SAP adapter is a disruption for vendors that really just prefer to focus on their own applications.
This disruption applies to both the initial development and maintenance.
In actual fact, vendors would prefer not to deal with SAP integration. Vendors tolerate creating their own SAP adapters because they typically do not have good options in the marketplace. But with the SAP Integration Ninja, that option exists.
- The SAP Integration Ninja is 100% located on the public cloud and therefore is always available to both us and to the customer. This makes troubleshooting easier and less expensive.
- Using our Ninja is less overhead than building one’s adapter, and it is less distracting to the vendor that can reallocate that time to their core efforts.
Benefit #3: Speed
The SAP Integration Ninja is faster than what the vendor would create for themselves. We can demonstrate the speed of the SAP Integration Ninja in a demo that we schedule both for the vendor and for the customer.
This is again due to our architecture and our ability to customize the server-side for the interface.
Benefit #4: Managed Service Versus Software
The SAP Integration Ninja is a managed service, or integration as a service, something frequently discussed, but rarely offered.
This means we offer a subscription and actively manage the interface. This is in opposition to the vast majority of integration vendors that simply want the software sale and nothing to do with interface maintenance.
This provides and an overall less expensive and more predictable process for SAP integration.
Benefit #5: Less Reliance on SAP
The SAP Integration Ninja allows for less reliance on SAP.
This is because SAP often uses certification of adapters to force vendors into participating in partnerships that are ultimately harmful to the vendor and censor what they can say. We are also the most extensive research entity in SAP, and understand how SAP controls vendors though partnerships. We cover this topic in the article How to Best Understand the Pitfalls of Vendor Partnership with SAP.
Customers do like to see the “SAP Certified” logo on a website, but there is something customers like seeing even better — a demo of the interface.
- Becoming an SAP Certified Partner seems right in the short term, but it means handing over tremendous control to SAP — and in fact, it is a primary way that SAP uses to restrict competition.
- In our view, the SAP partnerships are a major impediment to vendors competing against SAP as SAP Alliance Management demands that partner vendors present their solutions as “complementary” to SAP.
Benefit #5: Better than SAP Integration
The SAP Integration Ninja is better than anything that is developed under SAP guidelines. This is because SAP is weak in integration and has a long history of poor quality SAP integration, locked into using components that are proprietary to SAP.
- SAP’s Selection of Inappropriate Tools: Everything from the SAP programming language to its cloud (which SAP promotes for integration) is all designed to lock in customers to their solutions.
- The Emphasis on Proprietary Components: The technical advice and choices made by SAP have nothing to do with the best technology solution.
- SAP’s Multidimensional Integration Problems: SAP’s integration technology problems also tend to their integration between SAP’s internally developed applications and its acquired applications, one example being Hybris (which is an acquired application).
The SAP Integration Ninja Approach
To find out more about the approach of the SAP Integration Ninja approach, see the following link.
Conclusion
The SAP Integration Ninja is what we rely on for integration for all of our SAP connectivity. It is a proven technology that does not cost vendors anything — we charge the customer, and because of our efficiency, the cost is quite reasonable. Using the SAP Integration Ninja is a win for vendors and for their customers.