Frends with SAP

I've been asked a lot about Frends SAP support lately. These questions arise from various reasons, like SAP HANA integration tool entering the end-of-life stage and customers are herded to purchase expensive SAP PO for integration. However, there is also a more significant movement behind these questions.

It has been a trend for a long time not to go for monolithic solve-it-all ERPs. The problem with solve-it-all ERPs is that they just don't fit exactly your business needs, and the need for customization begins right from the beginning. After customizations, your ERP might be in a state where it cannot be upgraded without large migration and transformation projects. In addition, you might find that you are forcing your business processes to go as ERP except, not vice-versa as it should be.

Currently, enterprises choose best-fo-breed systems for specific needs and use one ERP, like SAP, as their core-ERP. However, the movement to core-ERPs and best-of-breeds systems leads to the need for a generic, non-ERP bound integration platform. Frends as generic iPaaS with SAP is a powerful combination.

Frends SAP capabilities

We have replaced SAP PO with Frends iPaaS at numerous customers varying from the global food industry enterprises to pharmaceutical companies. The case is often an SAP upgrade where customers don't want to purchase SAP PO licenses as they already have generic iPaaS that can do the same and much more.

Frends includes a certified SAP HANA connector that includes the following SAP uses cases:

1. Running transactions
2. Calling BAPIs
3. Reading and writing data directly in SAP tables

Frends supports SAP RFC (Remote Function Call, legacy) and modern SAP APIs.

When an integration platform like Frends access SAP, it is called indirect access and requires a named user license.

Why Frends for SAP?

Here is a brief list of reasons our customers have pointed out when choosing Frends over SAP PO.

1. Avoid nasty licencing traps and "must buy more" selling.
2. Frends can do the same things as SAP PO and much more.
3. Frends has better connectivity to everything else than SAP itself, yet there hasn't been a single integration to SAP that Frends couldn't handle.
4. Frends has much better orchestration and automation capabilities, as described in this article.
5. Frends API management capabilities are broader as API management is core functionality in any iPaaS and side note in ERPs.
6. Break the vendor-lock that ERP with integration platform combo brings.
7. Integration tool that ships with SAP HANA is declared end-of-life, and SAP suggests purchasing SAP PO instead. Frends is just a much more cost-effective solution from the licensing point of view.
8. Frends brings better developer experience and monitoring and operations capabilities with standard BPMN2.0 as the low-code language and customizable dashboards.

Image above is a real sample process in Frends "coded" with BPMN2.0. The orchestration actually orchestrates Machine Learning component from Azure. You don't need RPA for this kind of processes. Single Frends Agent can do more concurrency than 200 robots. This is called hyperautomation.

Got interested? Don't hesitate to contact us.