Cloud Elements (discontinued) vs. SAP Integration Suite

Areas where it would be appropriate:

1. If you want a really 'deep' integration with a third party software, and you want all the control over how it interacts with your software
2. If you want a totally white-labeled solution, that is totally invisible to your customers.
3. if you care more about a well thought out/useful API, rather than a pretty UI

Areas where it is less appropriate:

1. If you want a Zapier-esque hands-off integration for YOU.
2. if you want your customers to do more of the work, pay for it/etc.
3. if you're a really small business, it could be too expensive. But it depends on your individual contract with them.

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

• Customer Support -- They have a knowledgeable team and are very responsive.
• Communication -- Most questions are addressed quickly
• Documentation -- The API documentation is well organized and easy to follow.

Incentivized

• 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

• There weren't really many cons to our experience. The only slight downside was the cost but they worked with us on that to make it work.

Incentivized

• Could be even more business friendly with programming language abstracted
• Ability to simulate the integration flow instead of a real run
• Have some kind of an AI-assistant suggesting the optimal design of an integration flow as it's being built (best practice assistant)

Incentivized

SAP Integration Suite is very helpful to us in many ways to manage purchase procedures, stocks, and data of vendors and suppliers. Also, it helps to manage data for service providers. SAP Integration Suite has the tool to conduct training and evaluation. Unique features like the cloud can provide access from any place and by any device is very helpful.

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

The support for SAP Integration Suite is satisfactory. We leverage SAP support through our manage services partner. So far, we have not had many major issues. One concern, to make our rating a ten, would be turnaround time on high priority incidents. SAP Integration Suite drives our key business functions forward. Without a reasonable service level agreement on turnaround, we sometimes find us running into issues running pay, etc.

Incentivized

Work with an SAP implementation partner, if possible.

Incentivized

MuleSoft is also a similar product to Cloud Elements, but is not available as an option in this form.

Workato and MuleSoft are competing cloud API connector platforms that perform a similar function to Cloud Elements. We chose Cloud Elements over them because CE provided a more robust path to unifying the behavior of connected systems.

Zapier is a workflow automation tool that I feel draws erroneous comparison to Cloud Elements that I need to highlight. Workflow automation tools (Zapier, IFTTT, Microsoft Flow) do provide multiple integrations, but for simplistic scenarios where only a handful of explicitly described steps need accomplished. Cloud Elements is a platform for developers to deliver faster and with higher reliability than making integrations one-by-one in complex systems that solve demanding problems.

Incentivized

Having lots of applications on SAP ecosystems, SAP Integration Suite is the best choice. This comes along with many pre-delivered open connectors, also allows us to develop our own connectors. Event triggers batch processing, credential store and cloud ALM connections helped a lot for plug and play of end to end solutioning.

Incentivized

• We are able to build integrations in HALF the time we could build them from scratch.
• They allow our development team to spend more hours focused on developing our core product, not connections to other products.
• Their large catalog of services to connect to allows us to spend much less time researching other platform integration endpoints and increases our R&D speed a considerable amount.

Incentivized

• Ability to have multiple integrations across different SAP systems or modules and be able to actively monitor in one place
• APIs already exist for the different fields in SAP products and are easy to locate
• Can set email notifications to aid with monitoring and alert business process owners of issues

Incentivized