SAP Cloud Integrations from Automation by Broadcom

Founded in Germany in 1972, SAP established the global standard for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Today, the company has 105,000 employees operating from 157 countries. Over the years, the company has continued to expand its offerings and transition to cloud delivery. Currently, the company has 280 million cloud subscribers.

Limitations of managing workload automation in SAP cloud environments

While teams are gaining efficiencies by moving workloads and automation to SAP’s cloud environments, significant challenges remain. One key reason for this is that many organizations have business services that rely upon workloads running in SAP and other environments. While automation operators can use SAP tools to manage their SAP-based workloads, these tools don’t provide complete visibility of the end-to-end automated process, track dependencies between jobs, or provide insights into potential SLA breaches.

When running automation in SAP environments, teams can employ basic, time-based schedulers. The problem is that these technologies typically can’t accommodate dependencies—and in SAP environments workflows typically have multiple upstream and downstream dependencies. Given this, most teams resort to using workarounds. For example, teams create hard-wired time delays, that is, scheduling subsequent tasks to start at a time after which prior tasks are expected to have been completed.

Following are just a few of the challenges these approaches present:

• Reliability and data quality issues. If one task takes longer than the forced time delay established, a subsequent task will kick off regardless, which means it will use incomplete or inaccurate data sets. This ultimately results in the job sequence returning suboptimal or unusable data or even failing completely.
• Connectivity-related failures. When running SAP, users are typically reliant upon services running across dispersed, distributed networks. At any given moment, automation jobs can fail, simply due to a call to an API returning an error message. While sometimes these connectivity issues can be due to significant outages, they often occur due to brief, intermittent issues. When a hard-wired jobstream encounters this type of issue, rather than retrying, it will simply return an error. In larger, more complex environments, this can lead to the cascading failures of multiple jobs.
• High costs and poor resource utilization. One way to circumvent these issues is by adding buffers. With this approach, operators delay the start time of subsequent jobs to accommodate potential delays. While this approach can help reduce failures, the downside is that cloud resources must be kept idling longer, which can ultimately add significant costs.
• Labor-intensive follow-up and mitigation. If a failure is discovered while a workstream is underway, administrators generally have to contend with manual, labor-intensive follow-up. This effort can include disabling the schedule and manually troubleshooting issues, often across multiple products.

The solution: Cloud Integrations from Automation by Broadcom

Automation by Broadcom gives you unified automation observability—so you can avoid the challenges outlined above. With Automation by Broadcom, you can effectively establish a “manager of managers,” employing a unified tool to govern your disparate cloud scheduling and workflow orchestration tools.

With Automation by Broadcom, you can visualize and monitor automated processes across your entire technology stack, including SAP systems and non-SAP applications. The solution offers unified coverage of workloads spanning mainframe, distributed, virtual, and cloud environments. Automation by Broadcom delivers robust scheduling that enables users to manage dependencies across pipelines, integrations, applications, and processes.

Automation by Broadcom is an enterprise automation platform proven in SAP environments for decades. The solution offers these capabilities:

• Establish comprehensive, centralized auditing and control.
• Streamline automation of data pipelines.
• Provide developers and business users with self-service access to automation.
• Employ predictive analytics and intelligent alerting.
• Leverage advanced SLA management, reporting, and auditing.

Today, Automation by Broadcoms offers integrations for these SAP cloud solutions:

SAP Cloud ERP

SAP delivers its highly-rated ERP capabilities via the cloud, providing customers with convenient access and nearly infinite scalability and flexibility. With integrations for AutoSys, dSeries, and Automic Automation, your teams can run and monitor SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) and SAP DSoD jobs.

SAP Data Intelligence Cloud

SAP Data Intelligence serves as the data orchestration layer of SAP’s business technology platform, enabling teams to connect, enrich, and orchestrate disjointed data assets. With integrations for Automic Automation, AutoSys, and dSeries, you can gain these capabilities:

• Run and monitor SAP Data Intelligence graphs.
• Schedule execution of SAP Data Intelligence graphs on a target environment.
• Monitor the status of SAP Data Intelligence jobs from start to completion.
• Stop SAP Data Intelligence jobs.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence is an enterprise reporting system that enables business users to do ad hoc queries and reporting. Through the integration, you can centrally control automated BusinessObjects workloads, such as running batch reporting jobs and distributing reports, including via email, FTP, and SFTP.  Today, an integration is available for AutoSys and dSeries and an integration for Automic is coming soon.

Learn more About Broadcom’s cloud integrations

Broadcom’s Automation Marketplace makes it easy to browse and search for cloud integrations available for Automation by Broadcom. The site features information on all Broadcom cloud integrations, including those for SAP, as well as AWS, Azure, Cloud Foundry, Databricks, Google Cloud, and many more.

Visit the Automation Marketplace to get access to integration details, technical documents, and software downloads.