The Differences Between Hardware Design and Software Development
SAP via a new alliance with Apigee announced today that it is taking a significant step toward making all of its applications more accessible.
Under the terms of the alliance between the two companies, SAP will resell an instance of the Apigee Edge API management platform. It will also encourage IT organizations that prefer to integrate applications via the cloud to use the SAP HANA cloud platform, which now includes access to a service powered by Apigee.
Bjorn Goerke, executive vice president at SAP and head of products and innovation, says the goal is to make SAP applications more accessible to third-party applications via RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs). SAP, says Goerke, will give customers the option to install an instance of the API management platform on premise or make use of the Apigee API management service.
In addition, SAP will make its numerous gateways accessible via the Apigee API management platform. In that scenario, SAP will give developers using RESTful APIs the ability to access SAP gateways that expose Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs) as well as Web services based on the SOAP standard.
One of the major gripes about SAP has always been the complex and arcane nature of the integration platforms that the company has offered. With the rise of the digital economy, Goerke says SAP is now making a concerted effort to make its entire portfolio of applications more accessible, including support for both the open source Cloud Foundry and OpenStack APIs.
Given the amount of data that now resides in everything from SAP Financials to cloud applications such as SuccessFactors and Ariba, the significance of having a standard set of easy to invoke RESTful APIs in SAP environments is likely to be profound.
