SAP Event Mesh
When I joined this project, SAP Integration Suite had no real-time event backbone. Every enterprise integration relied on polling, waiting, checking, waiting again. I was brought in to design the 0→1 experience that changed that: a native event mesh shipped as a core capability, and an upgrade path to Solace's Advanced Event Mesh that became part of how SAP sells at scale.
01, FEATURED
SAP Event Mesh · published by SAP
An official SAP walkthrough of Event Mesh within Integration Suite, demonstrating the real-time event-driven messaging capability and developer experience I designed.
02, THE CHALLENGE
Every integration was polling. Nothing was reacting.
Enterprise customers on SAP Integration Suite had no native way to build event-driven architecture. They were hacking around the gap, polling for changes, absorbing the latency, rebuilding the same patterns team by team. When the platform wanted to fix this, they needed more than a feature. They needed a new product category designed from scratch.
No Native Event Backbone
SAP Integration Suite had no real-time, publish-subscribe capability, customers relied on polling-based integrations with high latency and operational overhead.
Fragmented Cross-Suite Experience
Event Mesh sat outside Integration Suite's core navigation, making it invisible to the very users who would benefit most from event-driven patterns.
No Clear Upsell Path
Enterprise customers with advanced event brokering needs had no guided path from standard Event Mesh to Advanced Event Mesh, a higher-value, Solace-powered tier.
Dual-Brand Design Complexity
The Solace partnership required designing a cohesive experience that felt native to SAP while honoring Solace's Advanced Event Mesh capabilities, without creating a disjointed handoff.
03, MY PROCESS
How a new product category gets built.
This wasn't a redesign. There was no existing product to iterate on. Every decision, what to name it, how to structure it, what a developer's first minute would feel like, started from zero. Here's how I moved from that blank canvas to a shipped enterprise capability.
01
Discovery & Opportunity Framing
Before sketching anything, I needed to understand the real problem. I ran 12 customer interviews with enterprise integration architects and developers, people who were already working around SAP's gaps in creative, sometimes painful ways. What I found reframed the entire project.
Key Deliverables
- ·User research synthesis (12 customer interviews)
- ·Competitive landscape analysis
- ·North star vision deck for stakeholder alignment
02
Core Event Mesh Design (0→1)
The research made one thing clear: developers needed a system they could trust operationally, not just configure once and forget. I designed the core experience from scratch, queue management, message monitoring, developer onboarding, building the IA for a product category that didn't exist inside SAP yet.
Key Deliverables
- ·Queue & topic management flows
- ·Message monitoring & alerting dashboard
- ·Developer-focused quick start experience
03
Integration Suite Enablement
A product that lives outside the platform it belongs to is a product users won't find. I worked with the Integration Suite team to bring Event Mesh into the platform's core navigation, designing every cross-product touch-point so it felt native, not bolted on.
Key Deliverables
- ·Event Mesh in Integration Suite enablement
- ·Navigation & discovery experience
- ·Cross-product connection flows
04
Advanced Event Mesh & Upsell
The Solace partnership was the hardest design problem in this project. How do you position two tiers of the same product without making one look like a downgrade? I argued for a different approach than the comparison table and designed a contextual upgrade pathway instead, one that felt like a natural next step, not a sales pitch. This is the decision that shipped and set the model for how the platform approaches upsells.
Key Deliverables
- ·Tier comparison & upgrade flow
- ·Migration & onboarding experience
- ·Upsell contextual triggers within Event Mesh UI
04, PERSONAS
Personas
Sarah
Integration Architect
Owns event architecture, governance, and platform scalability on SAP BTP
Goals
- ·Standardise queue and topic governance across teams
- ·Monitor broker health centrally to prevent capacity incidents
- ·Define a scalable path from Event Mesh to Advanced Event Mesh
Pain Points
- ·Limited visibility into queue buildup, spool usage, and consumer lag
- ·Difficulty planning scale when advanced capabilities are not discoverable in-product
- ·Risk of fragmented architecture when bridge and upgrade decisions are unclear
"I need one operational view of queue health and a clear scale path before reliability becomes a business risk."
Ryan
Integration Developer (Event-Driven Builder)
Builds and operates event-driven integrations across SAP and non-SAP systems
Goals
- ·Configure queues safely for throughput, retry, and dead-letter handling
- ·Use monitoring signals to detect failures before they impact consumers
- ·Extend message flow through bridge and upgrade paths without rework
Pain Points
- ·Queue tuning is error-prone when limits and retries are not obvious
- ·Troubleshooting delayed or unacknowledged messages takes too many tools
- ·Moving from standard Event Mesh to advanced capabilities can feel disruptive
"Give me queue controls, clear monitoring, and a smooth bridge to AEM so I can scale without firefighting."
05, THE SOLUTION
Five pillars of the design approach.
Event Monitoring
Problem
Managing an Event Mesh effectively requires constant awareness of how resources are being consumed, but without a centralised view, teams had to piece together information across multiple places. Spool usage, queue health, active connections and consumer status were not easily visible in one place, making it difficult to spot issues early or understand the overall state of the broker at a glance.
Approach
We designed a dedicated monitoring page that brings all critical Event Mesh resource metrics into a single, unified view.
Spool Size, to monitor storage consumption and avoid hitting capacity limits
Queues, to see the state and health of active queues
Connections, to track how many clients are connected to the broker
Consumers, to understand who is actively consuming messages
Queue Management for Reliable Event Flow
Problem
Event-driven systems are only as strong as their queue strategy. In SAP Event Mesh, teams struggled to understand queue health and tune queue behavior proactively, which increased the risk of backlog spikes, delayed processing, and hidden failures in production.
Approach
Queue Visibility First, surfaced queued and unacknowledged message counts so operators can detect pressure before it becomes an incident
Capacity Guardrails, defined queue size and message size limits to prevent uncontrolled spool growth and protect broker stability
Consumer Flow Control, used max unacknowledged messages per consumer to avoid downstream overload and improve throughput consistency
Failure Isolation, configured redelivery limits and dead message queue handling so poison messages do not block healthy traffic
Lifecycle Hygiene, applied max time-to-live to expire stale events and keep queues clean and relevant
How Queues Contribute: queues decouple producers from consumers, absorb traffic bursts, preserve delivery guarantees, and provide operational checkpoints for monitoring, retry, and recovery.
Advanced Event Mesh (Solace partnership)
Problem
Customers with growing event-driven workloads needed advanced brokering capabilities, but the value and path to Advanced Event Mesh were not clearly articulated inside their existing SAP Event Mesh journey.
Approach
Joint SAP + Solace Service Framing, positioned Advanced Event Mesh as a natural extension for enterprise-scale routing, resiliency, and multi-environment deployment
Capability-Based Positioning, clarified when standard Event Mesh is sufficient and when advanced capabilities become necessary
Low-Friction Transition Design, designed the handoff so teams could move forward without abandoning their current Event Mesh setup
Trust and Continuity Signals, kept the experience visually and structurally native to SAP Integration Suite while introducing Solace-powered capabilities
Bridging EM with AEM
Problem
As organisations scale their Event-Driven Architecture, SAP Event Mesh can become a limiting factor. Teams reach a point where needs for higher throughput, complex routing, and resilience exceed what the platform can support.
Approach
We designed a bridging feature that connects SAP Event Mesh to an event broker service within Advanced Event Mesh, without requiring customers to abandon their existing setup.
Customers can establish a bridge directly from the interface, linking both platforms seamlessly
Message flow is extended across both systems, unlocking greater scale without a disruptive migration
The setup flow was kept simple, lowering the technical barrier to enabling the bridge
Upgrade Journey
Problem
Event Mesh in SAP Integration Suite is designed for smaller service classes with limited storage and capabilities. As customers' needs grow, these constraints become a barrier. However, many users were unaware that an advanced alternative existed or how to access it. Without clear in-product guidance, customers either worked around the limitations or sought solutions outside the platform entirely.
Approach
We introduced an in-product promotion experience within Event Mesh to surface Advanced Event Mesh to users who could benefit from it.
Clear messaging highlights the limitations of the standard tier and the added value of upgrading
Users are informed about Advanced Event Mesh directly within the Event Mesh interface, reducing discovery friction
Since Event Mesh is available to all standard Integration Suite users, the promotion targets those approaching or exceeding its limitations
Advanced Event Mesh is positioned as a premium upgrade, with a clear path for users to learn more and take action
06, THE HARD CALL
The business wanted a comparison page. We built a pathway instead.
The Solace partnership introduced a design problem that wasn't purely a UX problem: how do you position SAP's native Event Mesh alongside Solace's Advanced Event Mesh without making one look like a downgrade? The initial direction from stakeholders was a feature comparison table, a standard enterprise move that signals “pick the right tier.”
My read was different. A comparison table would make users feel like they were on the wrong plan before they'd even gotten value from the base product. Instead, I designed an upgrade pathway, a contextual, in-product nudge that surfaced Advanced Event Mesh at the moment users were hitting genuine capacity limits. The upsell became a natural next step, not a sales page.
The PM was skeptical, a contextual pathway was a harder sell to leadership than a comparison table. I built a quick prototype showing the difference in user perception and got buy-in after a single review. The pathway design shipped and became the model for how SAP Integration Suite approached feature upsells across adjacent products.
07, RESULTS & IMPACT
Design that moved the business.
0→1
Product Built
Designed the entire Event Mesh experience from scratch, shipped as a core Integration Suite capability
↑35%
Feature Adoption
Increased activation and sustained feature utilisation post-launch through improved discovery & onboarding
2× Tiers
Upsell Enabled
Designed the upgrade journey that enabled SAP sales to pitch Advanced Event Mesh as a natural next step
$$$
Revenue Impact
Directly contributed to revenue growth by unlocking enterprise-tier adoption and high-value upsell conversions
"Neha brought structure and clarity to a genuinely complex design problem. She navigated the SAP–Solace partnership, the Integration Suite ecosystem, and our enterprise customer needs simultaneously, and delivered an experience that scaled. The upsell journey she designed became a core part of our go-to-market motion."
Product Lead, SAP Integration Suite
08, LIVE PROTOTYPE
Explore the design.
Next case study
Driver Qualification Management →