Since the introduction of cloud computing technologies, organizations have shifted investments in software licenses.
Organizations have rapidly moved from the concept of software ownership to software rental. As a result, SAP is also growing its cloud-based portfolio with standardized products in HR (with SAP SuccessFactors), marketing, sales, service, procurement, supply chain management, and finance. We’re convinced that this portfolio will continue to grow.
Most customers may find themselves needing to integrate cloud-based applications with other on-premise or cloud-based applications to cover the total end-to-end business process. Cloud Integration is well positioned as the integration platform for such use cases.
Most capabilities provided by these cloud-based applications are standardized in terms of protocols, endpoints, and message structures. Therefore, integration scenarios built over Cloud Integration for these cloud-based applications have a good chance of being implemented and reused by many other customers and partners. This reusability is exactly what SAP provides with its prepackaged integration content for the most frequently used SAP cloud-based applications. This integration content is available in SAP Integration Content Catalog.
The catalog includes templates with prebuilt integration flows (iFlows), value mappings, and other integration artifacts that you can reuse, thus significantly reducing implementation time, cost, and risk. The catalog presents and categorizes content in a simple manner, allowing you to browse and discover content that might be relevant for your scenarios. SAP Integration Content Catalog content is bundled in packages. Each package contains artifacts and objects that logically belong together and support a particular integration scenario. The artifacts and objects bundled in a package can be organized into four categories: data integration, iFlow, OData service, or value mapping.
When dealing with SAP Integration Content Catalog, you’ll need to understand the different roles involved in consuming and publishing content. We generally distinguish among the following roles:
- Integration developer: A member of the partner or customer organization responsible for consuming the prepackaged content available in SAP Integration Content Catalog.
- Content publisher: The person responsible for building and making the integration package available in SAP Integration Content Catalog.
- Content reviewer: The person responsible for reviewing and ensuring the quality of the content delivered in SAP Integration Content Catalog by the publisher.
Separating roles during the publication process helps improve the correctness of the content published in the catalog. Note that, at the time of this writing, only SAP can publish content packages. Consequently, the content publisher and reviewer roles aren’t yet relevant to customers.
You can access SAP Integration Content Catalog in two different ways:
- Via a publicly accessible URL: You can access the publicly (and freely) available SAP Integration Content Catalog web-based application at https://api.sap.com. The landing page for SAP Integration Content Catalog is shown below.
Note that SAP Integration Content Catalog is published on SAP Business Accelerator Hub. You don’t need a Cloud Integration tenant to use this web application. From this publicly available URL, only read access is available. If you need to reuse this content or have access to other features, you must access a Cloud Integration tenant.
- Via your own tenant: You can access SAP Integration Content Catalog via your own Cloud Integration tenant at http://<server>:<port>/itspaces.
As shown on the left side of the next figure, the Cloud Integration Web UI consists of four main pages:
- Discover
- Design
- Monitor
- Settings
The Discover page can be used to browse through SAP Integration Content Catalog.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book Cloud Integration with SAP Integration Suite: The Comprehensive Guide by John Mutumba Bilay, Shashank Singh, Swati Singh, Peter Gutsche, and Mandy Krimmel.
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