Some of you may have seen the call for action for the XI customer polling end of last year. With this blog, I like to thank all the customers and systems integrators for their participation and share some high level results with you.
Background
19 customers and 4 systems integrators responded to the call for action and submitted a completed questionnaire. Many more showed interest, but after sending out the questionnaire we never received any answers. This is unfortunate, since development had a very close look at the results and is taking the results as input for future planning. Therefore, I wonder if the process with the questions in Excel format was not streamlined enough. Hence, next year, we will be using a web based survey tool, to make the process simpler.
Let’s move on to the summary of the results.
XI as a key enabler for SOA
80% of the respondents see XI as a corner stone for their SOA strategy. It will be leveraged for service enablement as well as for service and process orchestration. Also, 75% within this group will use XI outside of their SAP landscape for these purposes.
XI Project Status and Momentum
Based on the above, it only makes sense that 95% of all customers are expanding the use of XI within their landscape. 
Type of Integration
SAP to non-SAP is the most common type of integration. One quarter of the respondents uses XI for non-SAP to non-SAP integration also.
While A2A integration dominates in scope and volume, B2B type integration is used at 75% of respondents. 
XI and the Competition
70% of the respondents are either already in the process or plan to replace existing integration solutions with XI.
Within our sample customer, XI is used to interoperate with Microsoft, IBM and Tibco integration products. 
Use of Adapters
The most commonly used adapters are the SAP RFC, iDoc and File/FTP adapters. The relative low usage of the JMS adapter in this group of customers is a surprise. Also, EDI AS2 showed up as a frequently used connection type. 
Usage of ccBPM
80% of the polled customers are using ccBPM in production. The average number of steps per integration scenario is between 5 and 10, and the most extensive scenario has a total of 138 steps!
What WS-* standard should XI embrace
WS-security is by far the most important standard and feature set that the customers in this poll want to see XI support. The other end of the answer spectrum was to support them all.
Customer Satisfaction
We were very pleased to see the results for customer satisfaction. The majority of polled customers are either ‘very satisfied’ or ‘mostly satisfied’ with our solution.
Of course, we like to see all customers with high satisfaction rating and we will be using the results from this survey to get there.
THANK YOU FROM SAP
A big thank you to all participants of this customer poll. I hope you will provide feedback again this year and I would also like to encourage other customers to take part in the XI customer poll for 2007.
The XI Customer Polling Team
Anders Ranum
Joe Grazer
Ginger Gatling
Paul Medaille
Swen Conrad
