A vast majority of SAP customers are in some stage of modernizing their SAP and overall IT landscape to meet business demand for seamless workflows, integrated customer experiences and enterprise-wide analytics. Yet, often this modernization project is not uniformly applied across all applications.
Simple ROI (return-on-investment) calculations fail to show positive impact for modernizing several legacy applications. The cost and risk of modernizing these decades-old applications just does not seem worth the effort. "Why fix what is not broken", is the general sentiment among IT leaders, especially when they have a long roster of projects to deliver, including the complex move to SAP S/4HANA, and migration of several applications to the cloud.
Yet, one of the challenges of maintaining these legacy applications is the need to then integrate them with modern applications. SAPinsider research on "Integration in the Hyper-connected SAP landscape" finds that the largest integration challenge is integrating with legacy applications and databases (37% of respondents). Another 13% are challenged by legacy APIs and interfaces with poor documentation.
Seamless workflows and data needs newer applications from both SAP and non-SAP to integrate with some of these legacy applications. However, IT teams recognize some inherent challenges such as
- Inflexible, aged programming languages
- Poor documentation
- Lack of resources with the domain knowledge of the legacy applications
- Static integration approaches (often custom)
- Limited visibility of data flows to and from applications
- Poor data security
- Data latency limiting real-time interactions
- Poor user interface
Especially as organizations deploy new applications - include SAP S/4HANA and SaaS (Software as a Service) software, there is palpable anxiety that the integrations across modern and legacy applications will not only pose security risks, but will make transformation difficult.
What can SAP customers do?
Several are looking at a hybrid integration strategy, but one that helps the organization overcome the integration hurdles of legacy. The hybrid model may include several approaches:
- Build/revamp custom integrations with best practices, security and monitoring capabilities: For example, IDocs or Enterprise Service Buses can be redesigned. However, the cost and effort for these may be daunting.
- Use API-centric integrations provide more robust and secure integrations. API Lifecycle platforms can provide a strong foundation and governance. However, maintaining the APIs with the rapid pace of upgrades and updates can be both costly and time-consuming.
- Evaluate pre-built integrations/connector can ease most standard integrations out of the box. Several vendors have developed solutions that can rapidly enable integrations. However, the robustness and range have to be evaluated so they meet the business requirements.
- Deploy robust platforms such as iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) to bring the rich, secure and flexible integrations for a range of both legacy and modern applications. Several cloud-based platforms provide this functionality and release IT teams from having to manage and maintain integrations.
With the wide variety of vendor solutions available, now is a great time to remove integration hurdles for legacy applications so that companies can rapidly forge ahead with IT transformation.
