Sap Exchange Infrastructure and in for Ma Tic A

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W H I T E P A P E R

SAP Exchange Infrastructure and Informatica PowerCenter:Complementary Data Integration Capabilities to Support SAP Data Migration Projects


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This document contains Confidential, Proprietary and Trade Secret Information (Confidential Information) ofInformatica Corporation and may not be copied, distributed, duplicated, or otherwise reproduced in any mannerwithout the prior written consent of Informatica.

While every attempt has been made to ensure that the information in this document is accurate and complete,some typographical errors or technical inaccuracies may exist. Informatica does not accept responsibility for anykind of loss resulting from the use of information contained in this document. The information contained in thisdocument is subject to change without notice.

The incorporation of the product attributes discussed in these materials into any release or upgrade of anyInformatica software productas well as the timing of any such release or upgradeis at the sole discretion ofInformatica.

Protected by one or more of the following U.S. Patents: 6,032,158; 5,794,246; 6,014,670; 6,339,775;6,044,374; 6,208,990; 6,208,990; 6,850,947; 6,895,471; or by the following pending U.S. Patents:09/644,280; 10/966,046; 10/727,700.

This edition published June 2006


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Table of Contents

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2

Architectural and Application Data Integration Services

Components of SAP XI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

SAP Implementation vs. Data Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Addressing the Requirements of SAP Data Migrations:SAP XI and PowerCenter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Data Analysis/Profiling of Legacy Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Data Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Data Volumes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Data Transformation/Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Legacy Data Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Services-based Approach: SAP XI and PowerCenter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

About Informatica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9

1SAP Exchange Infrastructure and Informatica PowerCenter

White Paper


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Executive Summary

When evaluating technology options to meet the needs of enterprise data integration, many CIOs

and data architects consider enterprise application integration (EAI). After all, with features to

help address many data integration requirements, EAI toolsets seem like the right choice.

SAP XI and PowerCenter don't provide competing capabilities when it comes to data migration;

they complement one another, providing a comprehensive set of capabilities that ensure efficient

and successful SAP implementations.

When considering a long-term data integration solution, CIOs and data architects whose

technology infrastructure is based on SAP solutions should evaluate SAP Exchange

Infrastructure (SAP XI). SAP XI is native SAP data integration technology that offers capabilities

common to EAI tools and seamless integration into the SAP technology stack. They should also

evaluate Informatica PowerCenter, a single, unified enterprise data integration platform that

allows companies and government organizations of all sizes to access, discover, and integrate

data from virtually any business system, in any format, and deliver that data throughout the

enterprise at any speed.

The purpose of this white paper is to compare and contrast the role of SAP XI and PowerCenter

in data migration projects. This paper examines the differences between the requirements for

integrating business processes and the requirements for integrating data in the context of data

migration into SAP. This paper also explores the ways in which the capabilities of SAP XI and

PowerCenter complement one another and serve to ensure efficient and successful data

migrations and to reduce implementation risks.

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Architectural and Application Data Integration ServicesComponents of SAP XI

SAP's vision for SAP XI is to have the native data integration technology serve as a hub for

integrating both data and business processes to help orchestrate both internal and cross-

enterprise business events.

SAP XI is well suited to support this vision, primarily for its ability to meet transactional- and XML-

based data integration requirements. Figure 1 shows an illustration of SAP XI's architecture and

key components. Key capabilities of SAP XI include:

Business process management features essential in orchestrating services and crossapplication business events

Document- and message-oriented data integration Data movement-based XML message processing

Data transformation based on XSLT

Web services-based integration (either a consumer or provider of Web services)

:

Examples of business processes requiring data integration supported by SAP XI include:

Integrate inventory and procurement systems (e.g., when inventory drops below 500 units,send an order of 300 more to procurement system)

Integrate order, financial, and distribution systems (e.g., when each order is entered, generatean invoice and ship the products)

Integrate two transactional systems across the firewall (B2B) (e.g., when an order is placed inSAP of Partner A, send a electronic purchase order document to the fulfillment application ofPartner B.)


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Presentation and Analysis(SAP, GUI, SAP Portals)

Business Process Management(SAP XI)

Flat FilesApplications Databases Mainframe

Application Services

Transactional Data Access(via SAP XI adapters)

Business Process IntegrationSAP XI

Service Repository Service Container

Transaction Processing Message Routing

Reliable Messaging Event Processing

Messages XML UnstructuredData

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Figure 1: Architectural and Application Data Integration Services Components of SAP XI


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SAP Implementation vs. Data Migration

Every SAP implementation involves data migration. Most data migrations into SAP involve more

than one source system because organizations are increasing the scope of the businessprocesses supported with SAP solutions.

SAP implementations focus on reengineering and evolving enterprise business processes. The

challenge during the implementation is to determine how to configure SAP to support each

company's unique processes.

Data migration is about data readiness. A data migration is not just about moving the data into

SAP; it's about aligning the data to the business process within SAP. The data migrated into SAP

must be accurate and trustworthy to motivate the business users to transition from their legacy

applications and adopt the SAP solution.

It's a common assumption that migrating data from legacy applications to SAP is simply another

integration task that can be easily handled by SAP XI. However, an efficient and successful

migration of data into SAP involves massive amounts of data. This data must be accessed,

discovered, cleansed, and integrated before it's migrated to the SAP application. All tasks within

a migration-from profiling and analyzing source data, to data transformations and conversions-

must be applied to very large data sets.

To best support data migration into SAP, the selected data integration tool should be based on

an integrated, metadata-driven architecture to provide visibility into all data integration changes

across the entire migration process, including data access, extraction, profiling, transformation,

and loading. The data integration tool should provide the following data migration capabilities:

Upfront analysis and profilingof the complete data set across all sources of data

Extraction and movement of bulk dataincluding both master data and current and historicaltransactional data-from heterogeneous, legacy applications

Set-oriented transformations and conversions, since complex transformations must be applied

when data from multiple sources are joined and made to align with the new business process Centrally-managed, native source system access because migration projects require access to

a wide range of source systemsfrom homegrown mainframe applications to legacy client-server applications

Data audit and lineage capabilities that enable migration teams to trace and verify data,which gives the user community confidence in the quality of the data and encouragesadoption of the new system

Addressing the Requirements of SAP Data Migrations:SAP XI and PowerCenter

This section describes when and how PowerCenter's capabilities can complement those of SAP XI

during data migrationa critical phase of an SAP implementation that's often underestimated.

Since both SAP XI and PowerCenter extract, convert, and write data to targets, why should two

products be considered for SAP data migration?

SAP XI and PowerCenter don't provide competing capabilities when it comes to data migration;

they complement one another, providing a comprehensive set of capabilities that ensure efficient

and successful SAP implementations.

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Data Analysis/Profiling of Legacy Data

Data profiling is the analysis of data to understand its content, structure, quality, and

dependencies. As SAP XI does not offer native data profiling functionality, SAP data migration

teams traditionally take a manual approach to profiling legacy data. Manual profiling techniques

range from spot inspections of the legacy applications or sample data extracts, to analysis via

custom-coded reports or elaborate spreadsheets. These data profiling methods typically sample

data in a few key fields to get a sense of what the data is like in these columns, but the results

are often inconsistent and incomplete.

PowerCenter's data profiling capabilities provide comprehensive and accurate information about

the content, quality, and structure of data in virtually any operational system. Organizations can

reduce implementation risks and increase data confidence by automatically assessing the initial

and ongoing quality of data regardless of its location or type.

PowerCenter can help SAP migration teams move beyond wondering if their data is dirty and

onto fixing data issues.

Data Quality

Most organizations attempt to tackle data quality problems by implementing tactical solutions to

improve data quality within a single application or within a single business process. While this

approach may mitigate the problem for part of the organization in the short term, such limited

initiatives generally fail to achieve long-term data quality improvement on a broad scale.

Organizations need a solution to improve and maintain data quality enterprise-wide.

PowerCenter's data cleansing, parsing, and matching capabilities enable organizations to

standardize, validate, enhance, and correct enterprise data such as customer contact

information and corporate or third-party data. Powerful, algorithmic data matching

capabilities identify relationships between data records for de-duplication or group-based

processing. These capabilities:

Improve the accuracy of data, giving end users confidence in the quality of their data

Increases developer productivity, reducing the effort necessary to cleanse and transform data

Maintains data consistency and integrity throughout the enterprise by eliminating dataduplication

SAP XI excels at architecting and driving enterprise business processes. Data quality is another

area which SAP XI does not natively support. By acknowledging the challenge of establishing and

maintaining enterprise-wide data quality, organizations can use PowerCenter and SAP XI to model

a common set of business rules to drive their data quality initiatives.

Data Volumes

Legacy data migration projects involve extracting, converting, and importing data from multiple,

heterogeneous applications into SAP. When you consider that data migration requires themovement of master data (e.g., material/customer/vendor master, account codes, etc.), as well

as the movement of current and historical transactional data (e.g., purchase and sales orders,

etc.), the data volumes are massive-millions of rows and hundreds of gigabytes of data. SAP

migration teams are under pressure to minimize the amount of time critical applications will be

down in order to migrate large data volumes into them.


White Paper


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SAP XI's data movement capabilities are based exclusively on XML-based document processing.

While beneficial when addressing messaging-based interface scenarios, these capabilities may

not be robust enough to support the overhead of converting every row of data-whether that data

is coming from flat files, databases, or a business applications-to an XML format.Architected to support bulk movement of data, PowerCenter gives SAP migration teams the

confidence that they can meet their limited cutover windows for migration data into SAP.

Data Transformation/Conversion

Both SAP XI and PowerCenter offer mappings, which are graphical representations of data

integration processes, including the source, transformation of data, and target. Differences

between the two products arise when examining how mappings can be used for data migration.

As SAP XI is built primarily for transactional- and XML-based data integration, its data

transformation is based on XSLT. SAP XI's data transformation capabilities rely on creating the

XSLT-based transformations within the SAP XI toolset and are ideal for message-to-message-

based conversions. SAP XI does an excellent job in converting data from one XML format to

another. However, the transformation requirements of data migration projects are likely to exceed

the design parameters of XSLT. It's true that any transformation logic can be supported through

custom coding, but this approach can be costly when maintenance and reuse are considered.

PowerCenter complements SAP XI by exposing any of its transformations as a Web service. This

means that SAP users have the option to run PowerCenter data migration processes within the

SAP XI business process management framework. PowerCenter offers SAP data migration teams

powerful data transformation capabilities that can:

Improve the accuracy of data, giving end users confidence in the quality of their data

Address non-existing fields in legacy applications required by SAP

Fix name and address duplication

Join disparate tables and files (even across disparate applications)

Route data to heterogeneous applications in single mapping (e.g., one mapping can targetdata to SAP, mainframe, database table[s], and spreadsheet[s])

Legacy Data Access

SAP XI and PowerCenter provide different methods and approaches for sourcing legacy data.

SAP XI relies on a combination of native connectors for SAP APIs, along with a library of third-

party adapters. These adapters support integration via such message formats and protocols as

EDI, flat file, JDBC, and JCA. Any data sourced via SAP XI is always converted to an XML payload

prior to processing within SAP XI.

PowerCenter, in contrast, does not require all data to be converted to XML; it can access the

legacy application data directly. Nor does PowerCenter rely on third-party adapters to get to

non-SAP data sources. PowerCenter offers an extensive library of connectivity options.Figure 2 illustrates the diversity in the systems, message formats, and protocols natively

supported by PowerCenter.


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Without considering the context for specific data integration requirements, SAP XI and

PowerCenter seem to offer redundant levels of data access. However, each product offers unique

capabilities that offer specific advantages in the context of data migration. Let's use a real-world

business process to showcase these differences: purchase orders (PO).

Let's say that purchase orders created by a customer need to be sent hourly to the vendor. Each

PO is sent to the vendor via the EDI 850 message format across a VAN and needs to be

sourced, parsed, and mapped into the vendor's SAP ERP system. In this case, SAP XI is the ideal

data integration tool, since this process is a message-oriented scenario and involves EDI, which

is a source type supported by third-party SAP XI adapters.

Let's look at another example. This one involves six years of historical purchase order data thatneed to be migrated from disparate legacy applications based on relational databases,

mainframes, and flat files. Here PowerCenter complements SAP XI. PowerCenter provides native

access to challenging sources of data like mainframe applications. PowerCenter can perform

bulk movement of large data volumes in a limited window of time. Also, PowerCenter can

perform referential integrity checksfor example, PowerCenter can ensure that each PO has valid

vendor master and material master values and that each vendor master address entry is de-

duped and cleansed. This process can be supported in a single mapping with codeless

PowerCenter transformation objects. Trying to support this type of scenario using only SAP XI

would be challenging and time-consuming, requiring significant code to be created to address

performance and transformation requirements.

Services-based Approach: SAP XI and PowerCenterSAP XI is the enabling technology for the Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), SAP's

blueprint for a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). The purpose of the ESA is to show

SAP architects/developers how to use of SOA/Web services technology to better conform

to business goals.1


White Paper

Real-Time Data Sources TIBCO IBM WebSphere MQ JMS SAP MSMQ WEBM

Web Services

Unstructured DataPDF Word ExcelVertical Standards

(e.g., HL7, SWIFT, ACORD)Print Stream BLOBsAny proprietary data

format/standard

Open and RelationalData Sources

Oracle IBM MicrosoftSybase Informatix Teradata

Flat Files XML Web Logs

Informatica

PowerCenter

EnterpriseSoftware Sources

Mainframe AS/400 JDEPeopleSoft Siebel SAP

SAS Essbase Lotus Notes

Across the Firewall/WAN

Remote Data AccessRemote or OutsourcedBusiness Applications

Figure 2: PowerCenter Provides Access to All Sources of Enterprise Data

1 Mattern, Thomas and Matthias Haendly. "ESA: A 2005 'Business-Savvy' Take on SOAs,"Integration DeveloperNews, February 9, 2005.


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PowerCenter's data services-based approach supports the vision of SAP's ESA. Each data

integration requirement specific to SAP data migrations supported by PowerCenter can be

exposed to SAP XI via a data service. Building on SAP XI's architectural and application data

integration services components shown earlier in Figure 1, Figure 3 shows how PowerCenter'sdata services complement and co-exist with SAP XI.

Just as SAP XI would be used as an information hub to orchestrate services for transactional and

message-oriented business processes, it can also call out to any PowerCenter data service.

Figure 4 shows how an SAP XI business process flow can call out to a PowerCenter data service

for moving bulk legacy data or facilitating complex data transformations based on set based

aggregations, for example.

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Presentation and Analysis(SAP, GUI, SAP Portals)

Business Process Management(SAP XI)

Flat FilesApplications Databases Mainframe

Application ServicesData Migration Services

Data Access for Migration Transactional Data Access

(via SAP XI adapters)

Business Process IntegrationSAP XI

Ser vi ce Re posi to ry Serv ice Conta iner

Transaction Processing Message Routing

Rel iable Me ssaging Even t Pr ocess ing

Messages XML UnstructuredData

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Adobe

Enterprise Data ServicesPowerCenter Data Integration Services for Data Migration

Data Profiling

Data Transformation

Data Cleansing

Data Movement

Data Lineage

Data Quality

Figure 3: Enterprise Data Services Components Illustrate Complementary Data Integration Between PowerCenterand SAP XI

SAP XI Business Process Flow

PowerCenter Web Service Provider

PowerCenter Data Migration Service

S TF(x)

WS TranformationRequest

WS TranformationResponse

Figure 4: Detail of SAP XI Business Process Calling Out and Consuming a PowerCenter Data Service


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Conclusion

The chapter on "Analyzing and Cleansing Legacy Data" from SAP's online manual (available at

www.help.sap.com) states that the analysis of legacy data is critical for successful migration intoSAP and has the reader consider the following questions:

Which data exists?

How is the data structured (e.g., length, sequence)?

Which data can be transferred unmodified, which must be converted, and which cannot betransferred at all?

It does not elaborate how this analysis is to be done across the heterogeneous landscape of

existing legacy applications. The assumption is that identifying and preparing the legacy data for

input into SAP is the responsibility of the SAP implementation team. Assumptions such as this

one can lead SAP implementation teams to underestimate the scope and effort required to

successfully complete the data migration effort critical for any new or ongoing SAP

implementation phase.

While SAP XI is suited for transactional- and message-oriented-based data integration

requirements, SAP's native data integration technology can be complemented to extend its value

for data migration phases in SAP implementations. Informatica PowerCenter offers robust data

integration and transformation capabilities as data services that can be exposed as Web services

and leveraged on demand by SAP XI to ensure efficient and successful data migrations and

reduce implementation risks.

To find out more about PowerCenter can help you in your next SAP data migration project, please

visit us at www.informatica.com or call us at (800) 653-3871.

About Informatica

Informatica Corporation delivers data integration software and services to solve a problem facingmost large organizations: the fragmentation of data across disparate systems. Informatica helps

organizations gain greater business value from their information assets by integrating their

enterprise data. Informatica's open, platform-neutral software reduces costs, speeds time to

results, and scales to handle data integration projects of any size or complexity. With a proven

track record of success that extends back to 1993, Informatica helps companies and

government organizations of all sizes realize the full business potential of their enterprise data.

That's why Informatica is known as the data integration company.


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2006 Informatica Corporation. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Informatica, the Informatica logo, and, PowerCenter are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictionsthroughout the world. All other company and product names may be tradenames or trademarks of their respective owners.

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Sap Exchange Infrastructure and in for Ma Tic A

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