In today’s world Application
Programming Interface (API) plays very important role. This is given by nature
of every business which is nowadays – digital business. Regardless if the business
is between companies and customer (in its every form like customer, employees,
etc.) or between companies there always some digital part of it. The API connects
digital businesses. Whether it is business process, service, platform,
technology solution or content at the end it needs to be able to communicate
with other of these. So they must be capable of performing data exchange
between them. Here comes a role of the APIs. All parties involved in the data exchange
needs to have API. By this I mean that function which do the exchange are known
to all the parties and they can use them to actually perform the exchange. Moreover
in today’s economy driven by mobile devices (not to mention Internet of Things
(IoT) or even Internet of Everything (IoE)). Companies data (e.g. web shop data)
must be available in the form of software responses to queries from other
software or applications. This is so true for companies ruining their ERP
systems where SAP is big player in the field.
Historically it is not one
of SAP strength (e.g. see
here) when it comes to the API. Over the years SAP has tried to something
about it but with not much success. There were, hmm well they still are there their
own solutions which tried to kind of cover role of API. To name few of them them:
SAP Enterprise Services (SOA), BAPIs, IDocs. The most famous are probably sets
of remote execution functions called BAPI. However in today’s world it becomes
clear that SAP has to be more aggressive API when it comes to their API approach.
To solve in larger scale SAP
turned to APIgee. They both recently announced
a partnership.
In this term SAP will delivers the API management application based on OEM’s Apigee Edge digital acceleration platform.
The SAP API Management application will be available as a cloud solution on HANA
Cloud Platform (HEC) and also as an on-premise solution.
The SAP API Management
application provides managing of exposed functions (e.g. services available
over the web) of backend systems and it has following scope:
Security –
controls access to exposed services
Compatibility –
support of different platform and devices that consume services
Measurability –
monitoring of services
SAP API Management
consists of following parts that all provide infrastructure for the API management:
API
Platform - creation, security, management, consuming or
basically all operations within API
Analytics
Services – analytics on top of API, to see trends in its e.g. usage
Developer
Services - tools to manage the community of application developers
The importance of API is
very significant with SAP offerings like SAP Gateway.
The Gateway provides ODATA access to SAP data. As it is currently used at very
large scale within SAP customers therefore was seen a clear need for API management
tool. Technically having SAP API Management on top Gateway will call on predefined
Gateway services, and expose those services in the cloud. Gateway’s
service catalogs will be integrated with API Management. This means out-of-the-box
integration with that catalog as API proxy will be defined then catalog can be browsed
and finally there is a call up of service.
Other vendors of API mngt software,
basically competitors to APIgee:
More information:
2051594 - SAP API
Management - Release Note
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