How do SAP and Navision interact with third-party applications?

Question

I am developing a business application and, provided that many companies look for integration, I would like to make it "compatible" with business systems like SAP or Navision. What mechanisms do these systems use for importing/exporting/syncing data with third-party applications?

Answer 1

There exist software tools known as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) whose purpose is to act as middleware to enable the integration of applications across a company.

Apache Camel is an example of such framework, but there exist many of them. You can find a comparison list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_business_integration_software

As the user nmiranda pointed out, in the case of SAP, the framework used for data interchange is SAP PI (SAP NetWeaver Process Integration).

I think your question was actually aimed to find this "starting point", wasn't it? I faced the same question some years ago and I also wondered if there was any "standard" interface to integrate applications. In such case, I hope have helped you.

Answer 2

There are multiple ways to integrate with ERP data sources. You can do batch integration where you setup a query that pulls the data from the source ERPs on a scheduled bases. ETL tools like Informatica and Talend shines on this front.

If you want online data integration when you want live data in your business application then you need to look at Data Virtualization solutions like Denodo, VirtDB or Composite.

Prices, feature sets, performance and flexibility highly differ. One distinguishing factor in my practice is security. Solutions tend to extract data into file system, which makes a problem when sensitive data is extracted. In real projects, implementors usually start a long process replicating the source system security objects in the target application.