A question I get every week from customers across the globe is, “How can I integrate my SAP system with Apache Kafka?” This post explores various alternatives, including connectors, third party tools, custom glue code, and trade-offs between the different options.
After exploring what SAP is, I will discuss several integration options between Apache Kafka and SAP systems:
- Traditional middleware (ETL/ESB)
- Web services (SOAP/REST)
- 3rd party turnkey solutions
- Kafka-native connectivity with Kafka Connect
- Custom glue code using SAP SDKs
Disclaimer before you read on:
I am not an SAP expert. It is tough to stay up-to-date with the vast and complex ecosystem of SAP products, (re-)brands, versions, services, SDKs, and APIs. I am sorry if some of the below information is not 100% accurate or outdated. Always double-check on the SAP website (if the links from Google still work, I had some issues with some pages “no longer available” while researching for this blog post). If you see any inaccurate or missing information, please let me know and I will update the blog post.
What is SAP?
SAP is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations.
It is quite interesting: Nobody asks how to integrate with IBM or Oracle. Instead, people more specifically ask how to integrate with IBM MQ, IBM DB2, IBM Mainframe (still very ambiguous), or any other of the hundreds of IBM products.
For SAP, people ask: “How can I integrate with SAP?” Let’s clarify what SAP is before exploring integration options.
The company is primarily known for its ERP software. But if you check out the official “What is SAP?” page, you find out that SAP offers solutions across a wide range of areas:
- ERP and Finance
- CRM and Customer Experience
- Network and Spend Management
- Digital Supply Chain
- HR and People Engagement
- Experience Management
- Business Technology Platform
- Digital Transformation
- Small and Midsize Enterprises
- Industry Solutions
SAP’s Software Portfolio
SAP’s stack includes homegrown products like SAP ERP and acquisitions with their own codebase, including Ariba for supplier network, hybris for e-commerce solutions, Concur for travel & expense management, and Qualtrics for experience management.
Even if you talk about SAP ERP, the situation is still not that easy. Most companies still run SAP ERP Central Component (ECC, formerly called SAP R/3), SAP’s sophisticated (and aged) ERP product. ECC runs on a third-party relational database from Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft, while HANA is SAP’s in-memory database. The new ERP product is SAP S4/Hana (no, this is not just the famous in-memory database). Oh, and there is SAP S4/Hana Cloud. And before you wonder: No, this is not the same feature set as the on-premise version!
Various interfaces exist depending on your product. An interface can be an (awful) proprietary technologies like BAPI or iDoc, (okayish) standards-based web service APIs using SOAP or REST / HTTP, a (non-scalable) JDBC database connectivity, or if you are lucky even a (scalable and real-time) Event/Messaging API.
#integration #kafka #sap #middleware #sap erp #sap hana #kafka connect platform #kafka connectors #bapi #idoc
