Over the past years, IT departments have invested heavily in e-commerce applications and customer-oriented software solutions (best-of-breed). Now they need to ask themselves how to put these components to use. In times of ever-tightening IT budgets, heterogeneous system landscapes are a major cost factor and are usually hard to integrate.

Heterogeneous system landscapes with a number of SAP products and third-party systems that are implemented on different platforms and standards (Java, ABAP, etc.) drive up integration costs and result in an ever-growing and rigid IT environment. The administration of such landscapes is becoming increasingly complex and the development and integration of interfaces and business processes result in a high TCO. Also, a company's ability to adapt flexibly and rapidly to changing customers / suppliers is affected negatively by the complexity and abundance of proprietary developments.

In the context of SAP NetWeaver 2004, SAP XI plays a central role as an integration tool making it an obligatory component of SAP's NetWeaver strategy that is indispensable for data exchange within SAP NetWeaver 2004.

However, SAP does not limit this to the capabilities of a sophisticated data hub, but uses BPM to provide the possibility for companies to exchange stateful messages across company boundaries.

By mapping integration processes and bringing together messages across component boundaries, SAP XI, with its integrated cross-component Business Process Management (ccBPM), allows for the definition, control and monitoring of complex business processes that cross the boundaries of companies and applications. What's more, with SAP XI processes can be readily and flexibly adapted to accommodate future changes.

Shared Collaboration Knowledge

With SAP XI you can collect all integration knowledge into a central location and store it in a configuration database. This makes it possible to reuse self-developed interfaces, processes or scenarios at any time and to instantly adapt them to any changes from a central point. Lower your administration efforts and quickly adapt connected applications to changing processes or partners. Coordinated change and configuration management provide additional benefits.

Process enhancement

With SAP XI we will implement a future-oriented technical infrastructure, consolidated business processes and centrally stored integration knowledge for you. This will significantly speed up company-wide supplier and customer processes and make them more flexible. As a result you will be able to react more quickly to changes in processes and new market requirements.