Minimizing Middleware: Toptech’s API-Driven Approach to Streamlining Terminal Connectivity with SAP BTP

Middleware has long served as the glue between enterprise applications, enabling communication and data exchange across systems. However, this approach comes with significant drawbacks:

Complexity: Middleware often requires specialized knowledge to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot. These complex systems can also create security vulnerabilities that organizations want to avoid.

Latency: Data must pass through multiple layers, introducing delays and reducing responsiveness. As middleware systems are customized over time, the code base can become even more convoluted and bloated.

Cost: Licensing, support, and infrastructure costs can add up quickly. As organizations become more reliant on these system, licensing costs can increase over time.

Rigidity: Middleware solutions can be difficult to adapt to new business requirements or technologies. If the internal team is not familiar with the middleware code, it becomes more difficult to adapt as changes are needed.

For terminal operators, these issues translate into slower operations, increased downtime, and higher total cost of ownership. In this example, the customer was already using Toptech’s TMS7 for terminal automation at their fueling terminals, as well as Tophat7, which connects and reports on all company-owned and non-company owned terminals.

To get started, Toptech facilitated a series of workshops to determine the scope of the existing middleware system, as well as the desired integration with the SAP BTP platform. Based on this evaluation, the Toptech team proposed a custom data broker as a suitable replacement, using a RESTful API.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) offer a modern alternative to middleware by enabling direct, secure, and efficient communication between systems. When terminals use APIs to connect directly to SAP BTP, they gain:

Because of these advantages, Toptech Systems has been a big proponent of APIs and launched the Toptech APIs in a previous release of TMS7. The existing API data broker was customized for this customer, with key features that include:

This architecture not only lessens the reliance on a complex middleware system, it also empowers the customer’s IT teams to build robust, future-proof integrations without the overhead of traditional middleware.

Based on Voice of the Customer (VOC) feedback, Toptech began developing a library of APIs to respond to the industry’s need for more data, delivered through a customer’s own business intelligence or ERP systems.
In this solution, the TMS7 terminals use the data broker API to relay data up to the centralized Tophat7 system, which is then communicated to the customer’s SAP BTP platform, providing operational insights. Beyond the technical perks, API-driven integration delivers tangible business value:​

To optimize performance further, Toptech developed a batch format to process large numbers of requests, while minimizing the number of API calls, which also reduced usage costs.

Middleware solutions often grow over time, creating complex networking mappings that may seem daunting to replace. If your organization is considering replacing a middleware system, there are steps you can follow to get a handle on the complexity: