SAP XI - Webpshere - complementing each other?

[Former Member]

Hello everyone,

we are in a planning process to roll out SAP throughout several locations in Europe. The project will involve upgrading the central location's 4.6C R/3 system to SAP Netweaver. The EDI business scenario in place is built upon SAL ALE/EDI technology and IBM Websphere as an EDI Subystem. Would you please be so kind to enlighten me by answering these 2 questions:

1) Is XI essential/optional to an Netweaver environment? Quoting a whitepaper, it “provides a technical infrastructure for XML-based message exchange in order to connect SAP components with each other, as well as with non-SAP components.” what does this mean in a concrete business scenario? What does “SAP components” relate to specifically? R/3 components (MM, SD, FI) or Netweaver components?

2) What are the pros/cons of integrating XI with Websphere juxtaposed to replacing Websphere with XI entirely? Is XI fully EDI compliant, or if 3rd party tools are to be used to make XI EDI compliant, how do these compare to Websphere in terms of costs and complexity?

Kind regards,

Sven Buttler

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

1) By SAP Component, they mean pretty much anything with the name SAP attached to it. Either components like BW or Modules like FI (really this is integrating with the underlying Net weaver platform anyway). There are different methods for integrating with SAP systems depending on which versions are been run but they are all supported out of the box. Non SAP systems may require an adapter.

Basically XI is designed to centralize all the integration between SAP Systems, SAP and non SAP Systems (e.g Websphere in your case) and non sap to non sap systems (if necessary). Older methods of integrating will still be supported although XI would be the recommend method.

2) XI requires an additional adapter (at an additional cost) in order to integrate EDI. There are also specific Websphere adapters from IBM for integrating it with XI. I cant really comment too much on the pro's and con's of either approach, sorry. Maybe try asking on the Exchange Infrastructure forum.

[ravi_raman2]

Let me know if this is still pending, i was part of the team that contributed to the XI and WebSphere integration redbook

Regards

Ravi