Hi guys, here’s the deal: We use Oracle Fusion Middleware as our standard middleware, which means every investment and improvement we make is towards its development, even though we also have legacy middleware such as IBM, Biztalk and a couple more. But we believe our efforts (support, policies, repository, code maintenance, etc) should be pointed in one direction and so every new project is implemented on Oracle.
However we are in the middle of a major SAP standardization across 5 countries, and SAP folks are telling us that PI is the way to go in terms of taking advantage of SAP standard interfaces (for instance between ECC and TM, CAR/POS DM, Extended Warehouse, etc) and PI’s ability to orchestrate processes. They also stress that a lot of things in SAP are growing towards PI.
The way we see it, PI is a good idea for near-standard interactions between SAP modules and also as an orchestrator for SAP processes. But the question remains whether SAP should communicate with other applications through Oracle only or whether we should also let PI talk directly with 3rd parties. We are inclined to believe that 3rd parties should only go through Oracle (even if Oracle then consumes PI services in some cases), as a way to maintain a single set of policies, single repository, etc. And that any enrichment or transformation should be performed in Oracle, so that we have little or no code maintenance on the PI side. Of course this will require an additional layer of code with little value added in case Oracle is consuming a readily available PI service, plus an extra point of failure. Also this assumes that maintaining a PI with little custom code means significantly less effort than maintaining one with lots of it (in terms of corrections, troubleshooting, amount of productive issues, etc), which we don’t know if it’s true.
So the decision about what role each middleware software should play is not obvious for us. Any insights or experiences will be highly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Alejandro