Well, even with NetWeaver and XI it seems that it is still not easy to integrate 3rd party systems with SAP. I did some research and found the following interesting products. The first one that seems very interesting (based on their website, I’m signed up for a demo next week) is the an Integration Appliance for SAP by Cast Iron. A friend of mine indicated that his company is considering Cast Iron as a way to integrate their Salesforce.com system with SAP. Here is an interesting blog entry on Cast Iron and the following wikipedia entry lists more integration appliances. This is an example of Cast Iron’s mapping editor.
The appliance allows full environment management, i.e., you can set up a dev, test and production environment. Cast Iron has three appliances for SAP, an entry level model for one application integration, a flag ship model for enterprise level application integration and also a high availability (HA) appliance.WinShuttle is another popular way to upload and download information from SAP. This product seems less flashy than Cast Iron’s appliance, however it seems to deliver the goods for many customers.Gregor Hohpe wrote a book on patterns and best practices for enterprise integration, called, Enterprise Integration Patterns
