Please advise the benefit of XI

Question

Dear Sir,
Can you advise the benefit of XI ? I need to find the document
Best regards,
Vimol

Answer 1

Hi
in the market there are lot of integration tools
like Tibco , Biztalk , Webmethods ..have a look on the following comparison XI vrs all.
We concluded with the following; BizTalk should be used as the main integration engine between the different system landscapes and ALL external communication, and XI should be used as the integration engine for all data to/from our SAP system landscape. Depending on the integration scenario, we may use both.
BizTalk will not see any SAP systems, only web services exposed by XI or using IBM MQ depending on an async/sync integration scenario.
We believe that XI is better with integration from/to SAP, and;
- In future SAP will deliver out of box integration for the XI system (XI content) for Enterprise Services Architecture
- Several components in the NetWeaver stack are using XI for communication
We have a SAP system landscape with several 46C systems (IS/OIL, HR ...) and newer NetWeaver solutions.
BizTalk ******
Overall communication between SAP systems and BizTalk depending on the integration scenario and who is the initiator:
SAP 46C to BizTalk:
There are no good mechanisms available for sending data from 46C to BizTalk, we are using HTTP_POST with XML payload. Then you must use the iXML library on the SAP side, its ok, but you will spend, in my point of view, too many hours on XML programming that can be generated automatically.
BizTalk to SAP 46C - Which SAP adapter to use for BizTalk?
We started with SAP adapter from IWay, but that adapter gave us a lot of problems on the BizTalk server (pretty complex adapter with strange behaviour, and several integration scenarios stopped working for no reason at all (unstable)).
The SAP adapter from Microsoft is more stable than the previous,
SAP 640 to/from BizTalk:
I assume you can use the web service functionality on the SAP side in order to send/receive data, but I don’t know whether 640 support asynchronous web service.
XI *****
The communication mechanism between different SAP systems and XI are much better than with BizTalk:
SAP 46C to XI:
Configure a sender communication channel with RFC adapter; basically the XI system will be RFC server so the only thing you have to do is to create a RFC port on the 46C system “pointing” to the XI system. In the Abap program, you can do normal function calls with destination (RFC port) AND the RFC call will automatically be translated to XML on the XI side.
Thus, you can forget all about the iXML library and XML rendering of the payload to HTTP.
Besides, you can choose to use sRFC, tRFC or even qRFC depending on the integration scenario and whether you want guaranteed delivery.
XI to SAP 46C:
More or less same as BizTalk using a SAP adapter, but string and table types are supported.
SAP 640 to/from XI:
This is a very nice situation, every 640 has a local integration engine, so the main integration engine (XI) can send/receive XML messages both async/sync. Another advantage is using the SPROXY transaction on the 640 system, generating automatically a proxy class being able to send/receive messages based on a message interface defined in XI (outside-in programming).
Finally *****
BizTalk and XI are at a conceptual level identical, two integration engines with the purpose of send/receive, route and do message transformation (mapping) using adapters to different technical systems.
SAP came late with XI, best integration engine, good enough. And for sure, I think SAP will come with very nice XI content in time (interface mappings between message interfaces – business solutions) which is beyond BizTalk.
Regds
Abhishek