Azure API Management vs. SAP Business Technology Platform

APIM is useful for the standard scenarios:

1) Securing your back-end APIs - If you have a legacy back-end web service that has a basic authentication scheme, you can add some additional security by placing APIM in front, and requiring subscription keys. Leverage your existing firewall to ensure only your APIM instance can communicate with your back-end API, and you've basically added a layer of protection.

2) Lift and shift - there are always going to be clients that don't want to update their clients to use a newer API; in some cases you can make a newer API look like an older one by implementing some complex policies in APIM. You can also do the opposite, making older APIs look new, such as making an XML back-end accept both JSON and XML.

3) Centralizing your APIs - if you've acquired another company and want to make their API set look as if it's a part of the larger whole, APIM is an easy way to provide a consistent front-end interface for developers.

Incentivized

However, there are many scenarios where SAP BTP is well suited; I will just describe one. As we deal with large volumes of data and often receive the data from diverse sources, the platform enables us to integrate the data from diverse sources such as CRM, ERP, and supply chain management systems.

Incentivized

• Easy commissioning of APIs.
• Great policies to control access.
• Easy mock services for testing.

Incentivized

• Authentication options - In the past, we needed to really leverage our own solutions for MFA and other security measures, but now, out-of-the-box these options are really good and readily available.
• Ease of use - the interface has been adjusted to be really easy on the eyes but also simpler, less convoluted, and really well thought out.
• Modernized SAP experience - compared to the old stuff, SAP is really modernizing all of the experiences. The new house style is rejuvenated, and the company is really becoming more likable compared to 10 years ago!
• SAP Discovery and Missions are a real treat to see what the upcoming costs are!

Incentivized

• Lack of robustness is a bit of an issue. Several other providers offer more options and capabilities, but then, they are lacking in interface ease.
• As with anything Azure, pricing is really hard to stay on top of. I always find that you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you get the bill. Having an excellent Azure Administrator can help resolve that.
• Integrating with app services outside of Azure can be a challenge, or at least much more challenging than just using Azure App Services.

Incentivized

• The almost mandatory use of HANA services to run CAP applications. It would be best to provide extensive support for other databases.
• The subspace landing page/cockpit is not so user friendly. Provides a lot of information and usually is hard to find where things are.
• Downtimes should be shorter.

Incentivized

Seamless integration with external system and dashboard to monitor the data flow and analysis are very essential for the business. The way the product is designed and modelled lead to minimum business disruptions. Adopting to the new and modern technology was easy. Keeping the central system as clean and adopting project bases development are advantages.

Incentivized

The development and deployment of applications require too many services. So, sometimes it is challenging as there are multiple services. The monitoring and logging mechanisms are not very apparent. This makes it difficult to choose the services required during design. Applications that use AI for eg., extraction or chatbots, are great use cases to build on BTP. Also custom applications that require a ERP integration but are not enhancements, are good use cases for development on BTP.

Incentivized

We are in direct contact with responsible persons at SAP. When we have a question regarding a service or functionality we will directly get help to move on with SAP Business Technology Platform Developments. That is important because SAP Business Technology Platform is heavily involved in our IT Strategy.

Incentivized

Training material in Developers Community or from Learning hub are really good... also most of the time we route through Discovery center... so materials provided by SAP is really good.

Incentivized

1. Sometimes the licensing doesn’t make sense, e.g., Difficult to understand the license for ABAP cloud runtime. 2. When SAP Business Technology Platform workflow cost is very high but process automation which offers more features has less cost.

Incentivized

Azure APIM vs Amazon API Gateway:

1) Azure APIM was a complete package that included a developer portal.

2) We are very Microsoft centric - so the Microsoft product suite aligned very well with our business needs.

3) It was faster and easier to stand up Azure APIM for testing than it was for the Amazon API Gateway.

Incentivized

SAP Concur allows our staff to book, reimburse and remain spend audit compliant. Our Concur system takes feed from Workday and interacts with Credit card vendor. It also makes posting to Accounting and does clearing. SAP Business Technology Platform helped in establishing connection with all these different tools in real time. It helps in getting paid to the card service provider through our Bank through interface, which is built on SAP Business Technology Platform.

Incentivized

• We can always think of positive ROI impact on business
• It helps to easily facilitate the design, deployment, and maintenance of our APIs

• Positive: ease to deploy applications and integrations
• Negative: PI/PO was much cheaper in our current contract. The message based pricing is understandable but difficult to quantity over time towards management
• Positive: no firewalls you need to worry about to get integrations or APIs triggered but you need to be concious about this and take your own precautions
• Negative: with integration suite SAP Business Technology Platform integration cell is announced meaning more responsibility to the customer to decide where to run what in which without certainty the current runtime will still be supported in the long run.

Incentivized