The SAP and Mendix partnership is built on a shared vision to help today’s enterprises rethink how to meet the ever-growing demand for applications needed to transform products, processes and business models. With the approach of SAP TechEd in Las Vegas on October 1st, we have made some enhancements to our offering with SAP. To show how we deliver a fully integrated Mendix Rapid Application Development platform that runs seamlessly on the SAP Cloud Platform, we are addressing two essential topics during our sessions at SAP TechEd:
- Unlocking SAP data and services to Mendix developers
- Providing a unified developer experience
Unlocking SAP data & services
Mendix applications use OData to provide future-proof access to data and application logic. This is the fastest and most elegant way to build applications which extend the SAP digital core. This is particularly useful when it comes to designing domain models.
SAP OData Services at your fingertips
We recognize that creating a domain model based on an existing database can be a time consuming and tricky task. We wanted to really simplify this for Mendix developers and started to look into how we could best give access to all this data while maintaining an intuitive developer experience.
Together with SAP, we came up with a very elegant solution. Developers can search and discover any SAP OData services available on the SAP API Business Hub and choose what they need.
When a developer has found what they need, he or she will use the SAP OData Model Creator, available in the App Store, to simply generate the domain model needed to work the dataset or service. In a snap, developers are ready to start designing applications, knowing they have the correct entities, fields and relationship definitions available. The SAP OData Connector enables your application to use all the advanced OData service capabilities in the application business logic, from data retrieval to calling OData functions. These capabilities are added as actions to the Microflow activities.
With the introduction of the SAP OData Model Creator, we decided to remove the standalone SAP connectors from the App Store. All functionality supported by those connectors can now also be generated by using a single on-demand tool instead.
Cloud Service Authentication
Next to well-known SAP ERP systems like ECC and S/4 Hana, we now also have full support to extend SAP Cloud Services like SAP Success Factors and SAP Hybris. Similar to ECC this is fully based on OData and secured using Principle Propagation using SAML2Oauth Bearer. The principle propagation is based on the SAP Cloud Platform Destination service which is now fully integrated within the SAP OData Connector of Mendix.
For customers that wish to extend these type of systems, tap into third-party systems and mash-up data, you will now develop Single-Sign-On experiences out-of-the-box.
Connector for SAP Leonardo Machine Learning
Bringing it to the next level, we have also added model driven Machine Learning into the offering by combining Mendix with SAP Leonardo Machine Learning. This allows you to bring these advanced algorithms—like image classification & feature extraction, product image detection & text classifications, optical character recognition (OCR), and translation services—directly into the hands of the business user to extend the business core of your company.
Unified developer experience
Seamless Onboarding
To create a seamless experience when working with SAP Cloud platform in combination with the Mendix platform, we have added support for SAP Cloud ID to sign up for and log into the Mendix Platform. Once logged in to SAP Cloud Platform, developers will now enjoy a single sign-on experience when switching between SAP Cloud Platform and the Mendix Platform.
Updated deployment options
The SAP Cloud platform is a multi-region / multi-cloud offering. The value-added SAP Cloud platform services run on IaaS providers like AWS, Azure and Google. Along with support for AWS, we have added the support for Azure to ensure that Mendix can run on both regions provided by SAP.
We have also extended the SAP Cloud Platform deployment option to include Microsoft Azure to make sure that customers can fully take advantage of the SAP multi-cloud strategy. As such, it is now possible to easily create new environments and transfer applications seamlessly between environments.
If you’re attending SAP TechEd, you’ll have a chance to meet the team and learn more during the following activities:
- At the NIMBL booth (#462). See a demo of the platform and learn how we can enable your teams to start using Mendix. We’re also running two sessions at the booth; “Build and deploy SAP Extension Apps <5-minutes”
- Tuesday, October 2 at 1:30 pm
- Thursday, October 4 at 10:30 am
- Find us at any of our seven sessions, on topics including Mendix OData connectors and best practices.
Hope to see you there!
NIMBL is one of North America’s trusted SAP Partners. Powered since 2009 through countless successful initiatives, NIMBL provides business transformation and technical consulting (such as SAP S/4HANA Private, Public and On-premise; SAP Cloud Platform; Analytics; Leonardo; and SAP Solution Manager) as well as cost-effective Denver-based Application Management Services (AMS) to both the Midmarket and Fortune 1000. Recently acquired by internationally-respected SAP Consultant Techedge, NIMBL is now part of a 1700+ employee Global Local Boutique spanning 20+ offices across three continents.