Ron van der Sterren and Petra Mooijer have been at the forefront of SAP integration for decades, witnessing firsthand how the field has evolved. Today, SAP integration is more relevant and dynamic than ever. With the end of SAP PI/PO in 2027, another chapter in the history of integration is coming to a close. In this interview, Ron and Petra, share their insights on the latest developments, common pitfalls, and key opportunities for integration in 2025. Whether you’re preparing for the transition away from PI/PO or looking to stay ahead in the integration landscape, this conversation is packed with valuable takeaways!
Looking at SAP integration compared to ten years ago, what is the biggest change that companies today cannot afford to ignore?
Petra: The biggest shift has been the move from a best-of-suite to a best-of-breed
approach when selecting business applications. This has led to a surge in applications, both within and outside of SAP. In SAP’s own ecosystem, S/4HANA now serves as the core, surrounded by cloud solutions, services, and extensions. While SAP provides standard integrations, the increasing number of applications has made integration more critical than ever.
At the same time, the rise of APIs and event-driven architectures has transformed how companies integrate systems, ensuring faster, near real-time data exchange and stronger security through authentication and authorization.
Ron: Integration has become a business driver, not just a technical challenge. As companies shift more of their operations online, IT is now a key enabler of competitiveness. Many of our customers even describe themselves as IT companies that also sell a product.
Compared to ten years ago, integration has evolved from point-to-point connections in Process Integration to the much more advanced SAP Integration Suite. This now includes Cloud Integration, Trading Partner Management, Event Mesh, and API Management, providing a scalable and flexible way to connect systems. Since it is cloud-based, SAP can continuously enhance its capabilities, keeping businesses at the forefront of modern integration technologies.
With S/4HANA moving to the cloud, companies that adopt a clean-core integration strategy benefit from a resilient, future-proof IT environment. Since external interfaces remain stable, updates no longer disrupt business operations, making IT landscapes more agile and adaptable.
Petra: A common question is whether companies should move their integration platform to the cloud. As more applications shift, integration naturally follows. Cloud integration is secure, with encrypted data transfers and no data storage within the integration layer.
While some companies worry about monthly cloud updates, these are backward-compatible, meaning interfaces don’t require constant retesting. In the past seven years, I’ve encountered only two minor issues related to updates, and one was due to manual redeployment.
The biggest advantage of cloud integration is the immediate access to new functionalities and security updates without manual effort. The scalability of the cloud also ensures that businesses can grow and adapt their IT landscape with ease, keeping them flexible and ready for the future.
With integration becoming more flexible and cloud-driven, many organizations are moving from PI/PO to alternatives like SAP Integration Suite. What are your key tips for a smooth transition?
Petra: Before diving into the migration itself, it’s essential to define the scope and decide how to approach the transition. Will you take the opportunity to modernize all interfaces with new techniques and a fresh integration architecture? This approach allows for a complete overhaul, ensuring that everything is optimized for the future, but it also means a major transformation project that requires significant effort from the business side as well.
Alternatively, you could opt for a lift-and-shift approach, where you move existing interfaces with minimal changes, focusing only on quick wins. While this gets the migration done faster, some older integration techniques may remain, requiring further modernization down the line to fully leverage Integration Suite’s capabilities. In many cases, a hybrid approach works best—balancing modernization with practical timing, especially if the migration aligns with other major projects like an S/4HANA implementation. It’s also crucial to consider your business processes across the organization to define which integrations should be prioritized.
Ron: I completely agree. It’s also important to look beyond just migrating SAP PO and consider your entire application landscape. Start by defining your integration strategy—what types of connections exist, which partners are involved, and whether the current technologies are truly optimal.
Think about whether integration platforms should be consolidated and what integration patterns are in place. Is SAP Integration Suite the best choice for your entire landscape, or should it be combined with other solutions? Too often, organizations don’t take a step back to strategize first; instead, interfaces are built as they always have been, often with inconsistencies across different parts of the business.
I used SAP’s ISA-M methodology several times to map out your current integration landscape and requirements. This provides insights into different integration types and helps determine the best approach, independent of specific vendors. If SAP plays a major role in your ecosystem, you can take advantage of standard integrations and seamless connections to Integration Suite.
A structured approach, such as a decision tree, can also help in determining the best integration principles for each case—whether event-driven architecture, API-led integration, or traditional point-to-point connections like SFTP transfers.
While I wouldn’t recommend introducing a completely new integration strategy at the same time as the migration, it’s important to keep the long-term vision in mind. By ensuring that interfaces are migrated in a way that aligns with future needs, you set the foundation for a more scalable and efficient integration landscape.
What are the most common pitfalls that customers should be aware of when transitioning an integration landscape?
Ron: One of the biggest pitfalls is getting involved too late in the process. Integration is often overlooked until the final stages of a project, with the assumption that interfaces will simply work. This leads to last-minute development under pressure, without considering how applications interact or how business processes could be optimized. Fortunately, this is improving as companies recognize that integration should be part of the business process design from the start, ensuring the right principles and solutions are applied from the beginning.
Petra: A common mistake is embedding business logic into integration flows instead of keeping it within the applications where it belongs. Integration should focus on connectivity, routing, and mapping, not on managing business processes. Overloading integrations makes them harder to maintain and less efficient.
A lack of development guidelines is another issue. Without clear standards, interfaces end up inconsistent, making them difficult to extend, reuse, or troubleshoot.
Ron: Testing is also a weak spot, with many companies focusing only on happy flows and neglecting error scenarios. It’s essential to test how integrations handle failures, unexpected inputs, and high-load situations like Black Friday, where large volumes of messages can put performance under pressure. Performance testing and error handling should be part of the design and testing process from the start to prevent costly issues later on.
Looking ahead, which integration developments will have the biggest impact?
Petra: The integration landscape is still evolving, with businesses moving to the cloud, increasing their use of APIs, and adopting event-driven architectures. We’re in the middle of this transition. AI is another big development. Interestingly, SAP Integration Suite was already leveraging machine learning before the recent AI boom, using it to propose mappings for B2B integrations.
Right now, we’re seeing AI play a bigger role in automating integration development. For example, Advanced Event Mesh tooling can now generate iFlows in Cloud Integration that read messages from a queue, check the content, and write back to a queue. We’re not fully relying on AI yet, as integrations are often highly specific, and manual configurations are still more effective. However, I expect this to change as AI-driven tools become more sophisticated in the coming years.
Ron: AI is also starting to impact integration operations. It’s proving useful in detecting trends in API usage, identifying anomalies, and sending automated alerts when something deviates from expected patterns. AI can even help predict future integration loads, allowing companies to scale resources proactively.
Right now, AI functions don’t rely heavily on integration, but that could change as businesses find ways to combine multiple data sources more effectively. The potential is there, and I expect we’ll see AI and integration become more intertwined as the technology matures.
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Chris is based in The Netherlands.
