Background

Accelerating innovation and developing operational excellence are powerful drivers of long-term growth and competitive advantage. The ability to execute these strategies better and faster than competitors is critical to a company's success. Business processes are the key to unlocking the potential of these strategies for competitive differentiation.

Industry analyst firm Gartner estimates that by 2008, more than 60 percent of enterprises will use service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a guiding principle when creating essential software applications and business processes. SAP's approach to enterprise SOA goes beyond SOA fundamentals by supporting business requirements through the use of enterprise services. Enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) allows companies to quickly build and modify business processes to adapt to rapidly changing markets. With enterprise SOA, companies can unify stand-alone processes to quickly compose new end-to-end processes, selectively redesign existing processes and facilitate seamless process design and execution across company boundaries to take advantage of business partners' expertise. Enterprise SOA unleashes the untapped potential of existing business processes within and across company boundaries.

Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture

Enterprise SOA is a business-driven software architecture that increases adaptability, flexibility, openness and cost efficiency. This architecture elevates the design, composition and management of Web services to address enterprise requirements.

SAP helps companies adopt an enterprise SOA that can be quickly assembled together to compose new applications and enable business processes. With this architecture, organizations can improve reusability of software components and create agility in responding to change.

Based on open standards, enterprise services encapsulate enterprise functionality and expose it as a reusable service, which can also be combined with other services to meet new requirements. Defined by SAP, its partners and its customers, enterprise services can be quickly assembled to compose new applications and enable new business processes.

Enterprise services communicate business logic between software applications running on disparate platforms. By using enterprise services, IT departments can respond more quickly to changing business requirements, and they can reduce costs by taking new advantage of existing functionality in their landscape.

Organizations that adopt an enterprise SOA first define a strategic business and IT plan to help them evolve their existing technology landscape over time to better meet their business needs. Organizations can then implement this plan using the SAP NetWeaver® platform. SAP provides an enterprise SOA adoption program that assists organizations in developing and implementing their plan.

SAP is the only enterprise applications software vendor that is both building service-orientation directly into its solutions and providing a technology platform (SAP NetWeaver) and guidance to support companies in the development of their own service-oriented architectures spanning both SAP® and non-SAP solutions.

Business Benefits

• Solves the integration headache while leveraging existing IT investments. In the past, when an individual piece of application functionality was changed, all interfaces and applications that touched this component also had to be changed. A key benefit of an enterprise services-enabled application is that its business functionality (what it does) is separated from the technical execution (how it does it).
• Reduces overall IT costs by allowing companies to extend their existing IT infrastructure. Enterprise services allow companies to build new applications on top of existing ones, rather than, as in the past, having to either replace existing applications once a new business process is put in place, or spend a lot of time, effort and therefore money in building connections between existing applications.
• Supports innovation by enabling companies to execute new business strategies faster, giving competitive advantage. Enterprise services allow companies to put together the applications needed to support new business processes in literally days rather than months. This enables them to save costs internally, but, more importantly—in a world where most product innovations are rapidly commoditized—it enables them to gain competitive edge by delivering new products or services to their customers faster.

The Move to Enterprise SOA

SAP has established a clear road map for service-enabling its application suite.

• SAP introduced enterprise services architecture in January 2003 as a sound technology blueprint to guide its customers' deployment of Web services at a business process level and drive additional business value from existing technology investments by unifying both SAP and non-SAP systems in one architecture.
• In announcing enterprise services architecture, SAP launched SAP NetWeaver, the business-ready, service-oriented platform for enabling business growth through innovation. The platform enables SAP customers and partners to extend the functionality provided by SAP solutions to meet their specific business needs.
• The 2004 versions of SAP Business Suite applications offer the first service-enabled scenarios, mainly to promote user productivity and business collaboration.
• In March 2005, SAP announced the enterprise services architecture adoption program, which provides a set of combined software and services to help companies gain a tailored road map to best harness the architecture while effectively managing change.
• In April 2005, SAP unveiled an enterprise services architecture preview system that makes available more than 500 live enterprise services for partners, developers and customers, enabling them to test enterprise services and contribute to the definition and development of applications enabled by enterprise services architecture.
• In May 2006, SAP evolves enterprise services architecture to enterprise SOA, which goes beyond SOA fundamentals by supporting business requirements through the use of enterprise services.
• Throughout 2006,customers and partners can use the enterprise services in SAP’s repository to build their own composite applications on top of SAP’s application infrastructure. SAP also offers end-to-end industry scenarios (industry-specific composite applications) built on this new architecture.
• In 2007, all SAP applications, including those in SAP Business Suite, will be fully service enabled.

Additional information about enterprise service-oriented architecture can be found at:

www.sap.com/platform/esoa/

Copyright © 2007 SAP AG All rights reserved.
SAP, R/3, mySAP, mySAP.com, xApps, xApp, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data contained in this document serves informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary.

For more information, press only:

Shabana Khan, +1 (650) 461-1332, shabana.khan@sap.com, PDT
Iris Eidling, +49 6227 7-657 97, iris.eidling@sap.com, CET
SAP Press Office, +1 (610) 661-3200, press@sap.com, EDT
Rachel Allen, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (415) 591-4041, rachel.allen@bm.com, PDT