What are the benefits of open source in the EIC context?

Many companies currently use the SAP Process Integration (PI) or Process Orchestration (PO) solutions, for which SAP will discontinue maintenance in 2027. The successor solution SAP EIC is part of the SAP Integration Suite. Companies can use it to flexibly operate APIs, data sources and SAP services locally in their own data center or in a private cloud environment and integrate them with SAP cloud environments such as SAP BTP. This ensures that users retain control over confidential data and interfaces in-house in the future, thus ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, for example.

EIC is based on modern cloud-native, open source frameworks and container technology. The conventional orchestration and integration of SAP landscapes is being replaced by a cloud-native version of integration in the course of cloud modernization. EIC is another example of how SAP is increasingly opening up to open source platforms. When introducing EIC, companies are inevitably faced with the question of what they need in order to operate EIC, which is considered business-critical. After all, simply installing EIC is not enough. A stable substructure is also required, ideally a Kubernetes-based platform that offers all the necessary components from a single source out of the box for the secure operation of business-critical SAP applications. This includes high availability, networking, storage, authentication, security, logging and monitoring.

One such platform is available with Red Hat OpenShift. The leading enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform has been released for EIC since summer 2024. Existing OpenShift production environments can therefore also be conveniently used for the operation of EIC. Thanks to the flexible OpenShift deployment - from the single node to various edge tiers to the data center - EIC edge nodes can be integrated in just a few hours. With Red Hat OpenShift, the user can use a portal for EIC deployment and modeling the communication relationships between the services and APIs. The platform provides a container registry as well as the Redis and PostgreSQL components required for EIC. Everything you need is installed with just a few clicks using so-called operators.

Many companies face the challenge of equipping several locations or a number of production sites with EIC - for resilience reasons, for example. Red Hat OpenShift provides a central dashboard for the administration of all deployments and day-2 operations, meaning that the platform supports the global management of a large number of EICs. An S/4 migration can also be accelerated by combining an open source-based platform with the Ansible automation framework and EIC. Ansible supports the setup of the environment and the execution of the deployments before the deployed systems are then integrated with EIC to migrate the data.

A container management platform creates the prerequisites for modernizing SAP applications, increasingly also in the context of AI applications operated locally on the same OpenShift. In line with SAP's "Keep the Core Clean" strategy, in-house Abap developments can be modernized and further developed with modern open source tools and frameworks on a container management platform - and the whole thing can also be integrated back into BTP with Red Hat OpenShift on-premises, in the private cloud or via SAP's EIC and Integration Suite.

SAP users should use the S/4 migration or EIC implementation as an opportunity to build a stable open source foundation with a high degree of automation. On the one hand, this can optimize the provision, operation and monitoring of an EIC environment. On the other hand, it also creates an identical basis for future innovations. One example of this would be AI integration, which will be discussed in more detail in the next open source column.

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