Modern enterprises face plenty of technical challenges, but only some match the complexity of managing application integrations at scale. As organizations migrate operations to the cloud, the need for cohesive integration platforms has become critical.
CONA Services, an IT services provider for the 11 largest North American Coca-Cola bottlers that supports 90,000 employees and $35 billion in annual revenue, relies on SAP technology to optimize operations and deliver innovative digital solutions.
Last year, the company replaced its legacy integration systems with SAP Integration Suite, an undertaking that reflects the challenges of wrestling with complex API environments and platform sprawl.
The Need for Unified Integration
As companies across industries push more systems to the cloud, they face a common challenge: keeping applications connected while leveraging the same data in new environments.
CONA Services encountered this firsthand while bringing both Salesforce and SAP Concur into its existing systems, but the company’s approach to implementing SAP Integration Suite demonstrated how the right tools can simplify even the most tangled integration problems.
SAP technology forms the backbone of CONA Services’ operations. SAP S/4HANA handles the basics: finance, logistics, and orders. Over time, the organization has added other SAP tools, such as SAP Ariba for procurement and SAP SuccessFactors for human resources (HR). But unifying all these systems wasn’t easy.
As the network of APIs and interfaces grew more complex, overall performance suffered, and growth stalled. SAP’s decision to end support for SAP Process Integration (PI) in 2027 gave CONA Services the final push it needed to focus on modernizing its integration setup rather than dealing with an unsupported system down the road.
“We were looking for a platform that provides us with next-generation capabilities for APIs, as well as a single platform that provides us APIs as well as interfaces,” said Umesh Borikar, Director of Middleware and Integration at CONA Services.
In mid-2022, CONA Services moved over to SAP Integration Suite, replacing its legacy API platform and consolidating the interfaces it had been managing through SAP PI.
Migration Without Automation
The path to modernization wasn’t without obstacles. CONA Services encountered a significant hurdle in the absence of automated migration tools for its APIs. “Initially, we assumed there might be some tool that could do things faster, but that was not the case,” noted Borikar. Manual API migration was time-consuming yet necessary.
The team also worried about performance and scale — after all, SAP Integration Suite was still relatively new at the time. However, CONA Services worked closely with SAP to iron out the kinks, resulting in a platform that ran smoothly and kept system outages to a minimum.
The effort and time spent yielded tangible results: CONA Services brought together about 100 APIs from 70 different applications into one location, making its systems easier to manage and monitor. The new setup handles connections to cloud services like Salesforce and Concur without issues.
The documentation improved, as well. “Any time we create an API, we publish in our API portal, which we have given all our consumers access to," said Borikar, discussing SAP Integration Suite's centralized documentation hub. "Then, they can come and look into the artifacts."
A Model for Modern Integration
The problems CONA Services faced throughout its journey to SAP Integration Suite are commonplace at the modern enterprise. ASUG’s 2024 Pulse of the SAP Customer Research indicates that nearly a quarter of companies lack critical API expertise at their organizations and even more struggle when switching systems. Careful planning and collaboration between partners and teams are vital to overcoming these obstacles.
Borikar has straightforward advice to offer: “Start small, get your hands dirty, and get familiar with the platform.”
He also stressed the importance of carefully planning error handling while moving from on-premises systems to the cloud. “Even before you implement, think about the error-handling capabilities because it is very, very different from SAP PI," he said.
Many businesses are on similar journeys to SAP Integration Suite. In ASUG’s Pulse findings, business leaders reported that their second-highest SAP-related priority — just behind moving to SAP S/4HANA — involved integration between SAP and non-SAP systems. Additionally, 57% of organizations saw cloud migration as a make-or-break part of their digital transformation.
As businesses develop and implement digital transformation roadmaps to tackle such challenges, CONA Services illustrates that the optimal approach is often not the most immediately convenient. No automated tool could move the company's APIs. No shortcut could streamline the transition. In the end, the company built its new integration platform the only way that worked: manually, meticulously, and without compromise.