Difference between PI and ALE

[Former Member]

Difference between PI and ALE?

[marksmyth]

Hello Mohan,

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[Former Member]

ALE stands for Application Linking and Enabling. As the name suggests ALE is an interface which is a part of SAP’s Business Framework Architecture (BFA).  It enables integration and asynchronous data transfer between two or more SAP systems or SAP and non-SAP systems. IDOCS (Intermediate Document) are used for data transfer between the systems.

[Former Member]

Hi,

ALE (Application Link Enabling) is SAP's technology by means of which you can communicate between two SAP systems through Idocs.

PI (Process Integration) is a middleware by SAP by means of which you can transfer data from sender system to receiver system which may not be SAP systems. PI accepts data in the sender system format, transforms into XML with the help of adapters, and again converts into format supported by reciever system (with the help of adapters).

PI has many advantages over ALE like using XI we can transform source message to target message as per business requirment, but ALE sends data as it is.

[Former Member]

ALE is also used between SAP and NON-SAP system but only 70% of data flows and remaining 30% flows with the help of third party tool(eg MEDICATOR).Then use of having PI?

[former_member610738]

Effective B2B and SAP Integration

There are a number of factors that should be taken into consideration when integrating B2B and SAP systems. A service provider solution, such as GXS Managed Services, greatly simplifies this integration with your trading partner community as you only need to be concerned with the integration between your SAP system and the service provider. However, there are still a number of integration options that need to be considered:-

Integrating Using SAP Application Link Enabling (ALE)

SAP ALE can provide very tight integration between GXS and your SAP system.  With GXS’ SAP certified ALE adapter, you will establish a secure socket layer connection to GXS Managed Services.  GXS then performs a Remote Function Call (RFC) to exchange IDOCS with your SAP system.

Integrating Using SAP PI or Other B2B Connectivity

Many companies use SAP’s PI integration broker to integrate multiple SAP systems and to integrate SAP to other back-end applications.  If you already have SAP PI in place, you can use it to connect to GXS Managed Services.  One option is to leverage an ALE connection from SAP PI to GXS.  This will provide you with the benefits of tight ALE integration, but instead of connecting to a single SAP implementation the connection would be through your PI integration broker.

SAP PI also supports add-ons for a number of connectors for B2B protocols such as AS2 and SFTP.  If you have existing B2B integration capabilities, whether through SAP PI or some other integration broker software, you can connect into the GXS Managed Services environment using any of these standard B2B protocols.