the way it evolved over the past years.
Instead
Introduction to SAP Process
Orchestration
If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process,
you don’t know what
you’re doing.
—W. Edwards
Deming
As part of the SAP NetWeaver family, SAP
provides a combo product called
SAP Process Orchestration (SAP PO), which helps
businesses and their IT
organizations achieve most of their integration
needs. SAP PO is composed
of three different components, formed into a
comprehensive installation
package: SAP Process Integration (SAP PI),
SAP Business Rules
Management (SAP BRM), and SAP Business
Process Management (SAP
BPM).
Note
From this point on, we’ll refer to SAP Process
Orchestration or SAP PO
whenever we’re talking about the packaging of
Advanced Adapter Engine
Extended (AEX or SAP PI), SAP BRM, and SAP
BPM.
This chapter will first explore how SAP PO
came to be, what it is, and what it
does. We’ll then discuss the different
components that make up the SAP PO
platform, explore why these components are
needed, and how they make
SAP PO an essential piece in an organization’s
technology portfolio.
1.1 Historical Overview and Evolution
The three main components (SAP PI, SAP BPM,
and SAP BRM) that make
up the SAP PO software originate from SAP PI
and SAP Composition
Environment. In this part of the book, we’ll
explore the product’s history and
of focusing on every aspect
of the evolution of the products, we’ll focus on
the highlights. We’ll break the
evolution history into three sections: SAP PI,
SAP Composition
Environment, and SAP PO. We’ll then highlight
some of the new
functionality introduced with SAP PO release
7.5.
1.1.1 SAP Process Integration
In 2002, SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI)
was launched as part of the
SAP NetWeaver suite. SAP XI version 1.0
evolved into SAP XI 2.0 and SAP
XI 3.0 in 2004. SAP XI was built on top of a
dual-stack architecture, which
includes SAP NetWeaver Application Server
ABAP (SAP NetWeaver AS
ABAP) and SAP NetWeaver Application Server
Java (SAP NetWeaver AS
Java).
After a few improvements and new features,
the product was renamed from
SAP Exchange Infrastructure to SAP
NetWeaver Process Integration (SAP
PI) in 2005. The initial SAP PI version 7.0
evolved to SAP PI 7.01, SAP PI
7.1, and SAP PI 7.11. The SAP PI 7.11 version
included a more prominent
Java stack. This was called the Advanced
Adapter Engine (AAE) with which
you could choose to build an entire interface in
the Java stack. Not all types
of connections and functionalities were
supported at this point. For some
scenarios, you still needed to use the ABAP
stack.
Figure 1.1 shows a visual representation of the
history time line.
Figure 1.1 SAP Process Integration Evolution and History
In 2010, SAP PI 7.3 was released with a more
productively equipped Java
stack: Advanced Adapter Engine Extended
(AEX). This is a robust Javaonly
enterprise service bus (ESB) that can pretty
much cover all the
functionalities of the old dual stack, except that
the processes previously