Benefits and other considerations

Cost is always a driver. SAP XI comes licence free as a 'Usage Type' of NetWeaver. That means no licences to purchase and no additional support contract to maintain. Importantly XI comes out of the box with plenty of 'standard content'. This means it knows about SAP Business Objects and Processes such as Logistics, Service and Production Orders, Financial Data, Goods Movements & BI Content.  And therefore it supports the rapid development of integration scenarios involving existing SAP system objects and processes. 

Whats more, XI is based completely upon Open Standards. You could utilise XI within an SAP independent environment as a complete integration tool. Check out the Glossary at the end of this guide, but consider that XI conforms to and utilises the following global standards:

• Web Services WSDL & SOAP
• XML
• XPath
• JCo
• HTTP and HTTPs
• Java & J2EE
  

XI comes with the ability to connect to systems via many built in SAP Adapters such as JDBC (database), file & FTP, Java Messaging Service (JMS), RFC / BAPI / IDOC, SOAP, SMTP (Mail). In addition, 3rd party adapters can be purchased from certified vendors such as Seeburger & iWay, to aid connectivity to other proprietary systems should the standard ones be inadequate.

So in short you have the complete integration tool. So what are the drawbacks? Again, let's look at cost. If you're exchanging data between SAP systems (be they ERP, CRM, BI, etc) then message exchange is free of charge. However, if you're integrating SAP systems with non SAP end points, then SAP mandate charges according to total data packet size (as opposed to per message).

You could also consider XI against its rival middleware products, such as Webmethods, Tibco etc. Vendor product evaluation in terms of middleware, against critical criteria, is a suitable exercise to undertake. You may find that XI doesn't quite sit as the best of breed product in the marketplace, but you should bear in mind that the concept of NetWeaver and its components is 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts'. This means XI, or another element of NetWeaver, may not be the most functionally rich option on the market, but they do have one major head-start, and that's the fact that they are all bound together and delivered as a single supported application platform suite. They are integrated, and as mentioned previously, are pre-loaded with standard SAP content. Couple that with the fact that you are not taking on board additional licence and support costs and you begin to realise a lower TCO.

XI will affect the integration strategy of SAP's customers, including those who have already selected an integration suite from other vendors;..Almost all SAP users will need to deal with XI

Additional Capabilities

Let's focus further on some of the key capabilities of XI.

XI can act in the role of an EDI subsystem. It does this via specific Adapters which have to be purchased at additional cost (Seeburger & IWay are resellers for example) but thereafter facilitate EDI via the newer concepts such as Internet Data Exchange over the Internet (AS2) therefore offering the opportunity to eliminate a sizeable chunk of the traditional VAN costs.

XI also includes a Business Process Management (BPM) engine. This enables you to build complex logic into your integration scenarios, such as message consolidation, correlation and sequencing. The XI BPM is based upon OASIS's Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard. BPEL bridges the impedance gap that exists between systems. For example, a business system may be setup to make a synchronous call to access some data while the provider is able to support only asynchronous calls. Another example would be XI consolidating Invoice IDOCs received from SAP ERP, before sending a single Invoice message onto a partner. XI terms these business processes as Integration Processes, and a graphical modelling tool is provided within the XI Integration Builder.