Clarifying the Future of NetWeaver PI

On Thursday, January 28, the SAP Mentors gathered for a private briefing from SAP on the future of NetWeaver Process Integration (PI). The goal was to share the PI roadmap and clarify the confusion generated by a recent Gartner analysis of SAP’s acquisition of SOALogix, in which Gartner stated that the SOALogix acquisition “muddied the waters” for the future of NetWeaver PI.

The confusion directly impacted some SAP Mentors on SAP customer sites who found themselves fielding questions from customers nervous about their PI investments going forward in light of the Gartner brief. I have even read some speculation that PI is now a “legacy technology” for SAP. This requires immediate clarification for those customers who are invested in PI internally.

To clarify these points and share the NetWeaver PI roadmap, three SAP product leads, including Udo Paltzer, Solution Manager for NetWeaver Middleware, as well as Sanjay Chikarmane, and Yvonne Waibel, met with us on January 28 (disclosure: I am an SAP Mentor). They agreed to let me share this blog post with the SAP community after the webinar, and they have fact checked this content for technical accuracy (though they have not altered any opinions stated by me in this piece).

The first point of emphasis: SAP remains strongly committed to NetWeaver PI. The SOALogix acquisition had a very specific purpose: to strengthen SAP’s product offerings around the integration of project and portfolio management (PPM) solutions. As such, it has no impact on SAP’s plans for PI going forward. As Paltzer stated in an email to the Mentors prior to the webinars, “The SOALogix acquisition is not pertinent to the strategic direction of SAP NetWeaver PI or our general purpose SAP NetWeaver solutions.”

During the webinar, SAP presented their view of the “future of middleware” on which the PI product roadmap is based. In SAP’s view, middleware is shifting from an IT-focused concern to a business-centric function. SAP is calling their middleware portfolio “Business-Aware Middleware.” In SAP’s view, business-centric middleware involves the convergence of BPM (process management), event management, BI, and classic middleware into one integrated solution.

NetWeaver PI is a key part of this portfolio of products. Future improvements to PI and to other middleware components will be delivered via a combination of NetWeaver Enhancement Packs and major releases – a recognition that customers require more frequent updates of middleware functionality than SAP has historically provided. In his email to the SAP Mentors, Paltzer verified this PI release strategy: “First and foremost, SAP remains committed to SAP NetWeaver PI. We continue to invest in it and are planning to deliver continuous improvements through both enhancement packs and new releases.”

Recent (and future) PI Enhancement Packs and releases are as follows:

• NetWeaver PI, EHP1, released in Q1 2009 (NetWeaver PI 7.1) – already in productive use on SAP customer sites.
• NetWeaver PI 7.3 (next version of PI) - focused on centralized monitoring, standalone Java installation, improved quality and performance with features previewed at SAP TechEd 2009, targeted for release in September of 2010 as part of NetWeaver 7.3.

A major focus of today’s webinar was looking ahead to SAP’s Process Integration Roadmap, including upcoming NetWeaver 7.3 functionality.

A few notable points on PI 7.3:

• PI 7.3 will include embedded Solution Manager integration, with a “Good Morning” PI monitor in SolMan that will allow “central monitoring” of multiple PI instances in Solution Manager and make PI scenarios visible within the Solution Manager PI control panel.


• The PI 7.3 Enterprise Service Bus, driven by the AAE (Advanced Adapter Engine), will offer greater visibility into SAP’s SOA architecture, promising simpler and faster consumption of enterprise services.


• PI 7.3 will allow Java-only messaging, no longer requiring integration with the ABAP stack, thus improving speed and performance. .NET integration scenarios will also be available.

In his email to Mentors, Paltzer had this to say about the upcoming SAP “Business Middleware” functionality: “Our planned strategic direction for this family of products includes a variety of several significant new capabilities for end-to-end process orchestration, including complex event processing and business activity monitoring. Additionally, in conjunction with SAP BusinessObjects products, SAP plans to include novel capabilities for Operational BI, which represents the convergence of integration, BPM and BI technologies that enable intelligent business processes.”

One quote from the today’s webinar stood out to me: “low touch integration via standards-based interoperability.” That strikes me as the key to further PI adoption and a worthy challenge to the PI team.

My take: I’m glad to see SAP is continuing to invest in PI and to place PI in the context of a middleware roadmap that is in tune with process monitoring and business intelligence trends. However, technical experts who have spent hands-on time with NetWeaver PI have given me mixed reviews, some impressed by its capabilities and others warning of its complexities and learning curve. Given the emphasis SAP is placing on enabling its customers to differentiate their processes by “composing” on top of the Business Suite, and given the heterogeneous environments customers are running, I believe SAP needs not just good middleware, but best-in-class.

Many have argued that SAP needs to acquire in order to achieve that best-in-class middleware status. Despite the market rumors, at this point, SAP is taking a build from within approach. How SAP gets there is not important, as long as the destination meets customer expectations. In this area in particular, the bar is high, and so are the stakes.