SAP Ariba is the system of record for procurement and sourcing. ServiceNow has a bi-directional Ariba Spoke which can integrate between ServiceNow and Ariba. Since Ariba was born long before cloud computing days, they used to integrate between third party systems via Files. Although Ariba is moving away more into the standardized SOAP or REST API format, a lot of matured transactions were still done through CSV files, which Ariba named this Integration Toolkit (ITK). Hence, this Spoke is primarily focused on ITK integration.
The Spoke Action naming of this Spoke needs enhancements in the future. Currently, the Spoke uses the same name as those of Ariba's ITK names. When you see the word "Export" in the action name, it is actually from the perspective of Ariba. So it is looking up data from Ariba to ServiceNow (GET); when you see the word "Import" in the action name, it s creating new record from ServiceNow to Ariba.
Please note that Ariba has recently announced to de-support ITK integration by Dec 2023. That doesn't mean Ariba will deprecate ITK integration immediately. In fact, most if not all Ariba customers have been using ITK for their integration needs for a long time. It will take Ariba customers time to even adopt and migrate all their ITK integrations to Ariba's latest integration method using SAP API Hub via REST/JSON.
However, ServiceNow will continue to work closely with our SAP development partner to gauge when will the development partner contribute a new SAP Ariba Spoke that uses the latest integration approach. The tentative product roadmap timeline is Q2 2024.
In the meantime, please continue to work with the ITK integration using the existing Ariba Spoke.
SAP Ariba Spoke Demo
