Lots of marketing efforts and development has been put behind Salesforce Lighting 1 and its integration to external data sources. SAP in particular is a system that many would like to connect! Before you rush off and take a class you probably would want to do a little homework by reading what is all this "integration talk" all about? Basically Lighting 1 is leveraging an industry push towards an open standard, specifically oData. This new standard is gaining ground just like EDI took off as a method to push / pull data from your vendors/suppliers.
oData and Salesforce Lightning 1? Why is this important? The open data protocol www.odata.org is a simple method to query external systems and consume query requests. Why is this important? Because it eliminates the need for middleware! You can directly query SAP data from inside your salesforce.com system without actually loading the data into the salesforce.com system! You can start to build all kind of Mash-Up's to unlock your back end ERP Systems in your salesforce.com applications!
Salesforce.com is rolling out all kinds of tools for you to integrate your back end SAP and Oracle systems! These include: Lightning Connect, Lightning App Builder, Lightning Schema Builder and Lightning Process Builder just to name a few!
Look for more posts on this topic and for us to further explain how you can easily build a Lighting 1 Integration to your back end SAP system!