One of the major challenges facing organizations migrating to SAP S/4HANA from legacy SAP applications is integrating user-specific code with the SAP digital core. Until SAP S/4HANA, IT organizations would use the SAP ABAP programming language to create their custom business logic and then compile that code right in the SAP application itself. This highly coupled, tight integration may have been a boon to performance, but the drawbacks became obvious with the first upgrade to a newer version of the application code.
Every piece of custom code had to be revalidated and reintegrated into the SAP application core with each new SAP release, a process that could end up extending a version upgrade to months—or longer. In many cases, enterprises have decided to skip one or more SAP version updates to avoid the headache of reintegrating code written years or decades ago.
As part of the journey to the intelligent enterprise, SAP made the decision to change SAP S/4HANA from legacy SAP applications in several fundamental ways, in particular by replacing the tight integration and direct compilation of custom code from the SAP digital core and replacing it with the modern approach of using APIs to communicate with external applications and microservices.
Since add-on code no longer is part of the SAP core, version updates of SAP S/4HANA are greatly streamlined compared with legacy SAP, since all the code snippets have been moved to execute externally. New SAP S/4HANA version upgrades can thus be performed in a small fraction of the time it took to upgrade previous incarnations of SAP applications, and that is good.
The challenge for enterprises is that most non-SAP S/4HANA shops do not count agile, cloud-native development techniques as a strong suit. Further, many organizations do not have the capability to make the most of this transition—for example, by monetizing APIs that used to be buried within the SAP application or leveraging the broad universe of ready-to-go microservices that are available to meet a broad range of needs from both IT and line-of-business perspectives.
This decoupling of the SAP core from modern API-based code also enables non-SAP systems to easily connect to the SAP core, facilitating new, data-driven orchestration and machine learning functions to extract more business value from enterprise data, whether it resides in SAP or elsewhere.
To help enterprises simplify the SAP S/4HANA migration, Red Hat offers a comprehensive suite of solutions just for SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA. Not only is Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions certified for SAP HANA, but it provides a solid foundation for SAP now and into the future. Of particular interest is Red Hat Integration, which simplifies agile integration of custom applications and data with the SAP digital core in a way that promotes the reuse and sharing of services via APIs, treating APIs as their own products with their own governance.
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Download NowManagement of APIs is streamlined by Red Hat 3scale, an API repository and management tool, and Red Hat Fuse. Together, these tools manage every step of the API lifecycle, from design to implementation to retirement. Enterprises can use Red Hat’s developer portal to learn about third-party APIs, and 3scale supports the OpenAPI spec, which enables import capabilities for all SAP Business Hub APIs.
As organizations incorporate pay-per-use APIs such as Amazon Web Service’s Lambda serverless execution environment, 3scale can help control the use of external APIs to keep track of expenditures so runaway API use doesn’t lead to sticker shock when monthly bills arrive. Conversely, organizations can use 3scale to track usage of in-house-developed APIs by other organizations, not only to help monetize the organization’s work but to offset development expenses with tracked income from other organizations’ use of those APIs.
And, since microservices and their associated business processes typically are containerized, enterprises can leverage the Red Hat OpenShift container platform to efficiently develop, build and deploy those processes across a hybrid cloud that can scale automatically as needed.
Increasingly, integration includes the edge, where most IoT devices and their data can be found. Red Hat works with enterprises to ensure that migration and integration issues are resolved quickly and can provide valuable assistance before, during and after an SAP S/4HANA migration.
