Camunda vs. SAP Integration Suite

Camunda Platform is well suited for scenarios where there are different stages in a business flow and the flow is driven by user action at each stage. For example placing of an order on an ecommerce platform. Depending on whether user was able to make the payment or not the workflow would go to dispatch or retry stage. Now the retry stage would trigger further actions like sending follow up emails etc. Likewise, dispatch stage would have a different set of actions. Since every order is important and we need to know where it stands, using Camunda Platform is imperative. Camunda Platform might not be a right choice where just a one off thing needs to be done. For example, uploading of product information by user or periodic processing of heavy images by a worker. These are all either one step processes or periodic automated processes where we can track the status without using a business modeler like Camunda Platform.

Incentivized

In our case to have a such a poweful middleware in the cloud, give us a lot of benefits such as maintenance and support. In the integration part to be able to connect SAP and Non SAP applications makes SAP Integration Suite a good investment when our master data in this case is in S4HANA. Less appropriate is that sometimes the updates in production tenant failed and they have to downgrade or repair the issues. Affecting the usage of the tool. I guess SAP team have to be more aware of performing the changes and tested well on development environments and then when they know for sure that is the correct way to go with the update put it in production.

Incentivized

• Asynchronous functionality of Camunda Platform and different types of gateways.

• Enhanced API management features that allow now the integration with a multitude of data feeds and rating agencies
• Immediate evaluation of potential issues and configurable thresholds and automatic notifications.
• The application will monitor all aspects of compliance and update them automatically for several jurisdictions at time

• Camunda expects that you will develop your own user interfaces. This is either a benefit or a barrier depending on your perspective on packaged UI.
• As an open source vendor, Camunda is under-covered in analyst reports.

• Provide more pre-built integrations to use within SuccessFactors or other modules instead of everything having to be custom built
• Support is unable to provide advice on custom builds so you often have to engage a 3rd party partner
• Works best when you have the functional and technical teams working together. Otherwise, the system is too technical for a functional user to create integration and a technical user not always understand the functional perspective

Incentivized

It is in place, our system integrators are familiar with it, and it fits into the ecosystem. A better user interface, flow build and debugging experience would see it grow, many technical staff do not enjoy using it for this reason, however it is quite capable and powerful behind this one shortcoming.

Incentivized

The user interface is messy and not intuitive. It has a steep learning curve, and flows developed around are easy to make a mess with layout and can be difficult to follow. The debugging is also quite difficult, it takes some time to figure out how to follow the flow and examine data. Error handling is also difficult and not intuitive, it is better to let some errors leak and monitor through ALM.

Incentivized

Camunda provides pretty standard product support offerings.

Support is hard to reach and takes a long time to get a response.

Incentivized

Work with an SAP implementation partner, if possible.

Incentivized

Lacks good documentation. Training and documentation is geared towards those who are already technically adept. Does not have as many data integrations as other full fledged products. Paid version of Camunda is not as fully fledged as other products.

Incentivized

SAP Integration Suite was already part of our SAP stack, part of Business Technology Platform, with out-of-the-box integration with S/4 HANA transactional and ERP system that we are using as our main back-end. Thus, we are achieving significant Total Cost Optimization benefits or running both solutions on the same platform, hosted on Azure cloud.

Incentivized

• The positive impact is that we are able to ensure the business process is being followed and that results in orders getting processed successfully leading to customer satisfaction and revenue
• Another positive impact is that we are able to track any anomalies and any errors in the order flow and retry them so that users don't have a negative experience.
• A negative point is that it is an overhead to maintain so there is significant engineering effort getting invested there

Incentivized

• In the long run will enable us to undeploy our on premise solution
• As long as integration suite doesn't support all capabilities PO has complete migration is hard
• Will probably be cheaper than our on premise solution when we are completely migrated

Incentivized