BizTalk Adapter 3.0 vs SAP Enterprise Services

For those of you who are interested in integration with SAP, there is a document worth reading called Positioning SAP Enterprise Services vs Microsoft BizTalk Adapter 3.0 for mySAP Business Suite. The document itself describes the different scenarios in which you can use the BizTalk Adapter Pack 3.0 when integrating with SAP. These scenarios include:

• .Net Based Applications
• SQL Server 2005 Integration Services
• SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services
• Sharepoint
• and of course BizTalk.

In case you are not aware, the BizTalk Adapter packs are based upon WCF and therefore can be run outside of BizTalk even though they are branded "BizTalk". The Adapter pack itself is included in the license of BizTalk, but you cannot run the Adapter pack on a server without BizTalk unless you have a separate license for it or you do not have BizTalk installed. See the Adapter pack pricing page for more licensing info.

In my last post, I discussed how the SOAP and SQL Adapters have been deprecated for BizTalk 2009. Well, you can add another adapter to the list and that is the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter v2.0 for mySAP Business Suite. This is the adapter that originated in BizTalk 2006 R1 on the Microsoft BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications cd.

The primary objective of this document is to discuss the scenarios where you would want to use the BizTalk adapter versus when you would want to use the Web Service capability of Enterprise Services. SAP ECC 6.0 natively provides Web Service capabilities. So this document is probably to address those opinions that if SAP has Web Services then why do I want to use BizTalk,or the Adapter pack, to exchange data between SAP and another application?

Here are a couple of ideas that I can think of:

• Avoid point to point integration scenarios
• Take advantage of BizTalk's transformation(mapping) capabilities
• Durable messaging (retries, persistence)
• Monitoring(MOM,SCOM)/Tracking(HAT,BAM)
• Managing a Business Process between multiple systems.
• Adapter provides reliable, performant and secure data transmissions.