IT organizations that want to evolve to a more flexible IT environment but also take advantage of existing resources need an evolutionary, low-risk path to enterprise SOA. Customers need a stable environment from which they can run core business processes. At the same time, they need the ability to innovate new solutions in a side-by-side environment that supports enterprise SOA.

Many IT organizations work with a complex, heterogeneous technical environment – and must support diverse options for technical connectivity. When applications and systems are not integrated, businesses cannot gain real-time visibility into data or processes. To improve end-to-end processes, and to reduce integration and operation costs, IT organizations need an open standards-based integration environment to simplify technical integration.

Business users look to IT to provide them with a rich user experience from which they can collaborate effectively across organizational boundaries to perform tasks that enable the company to run more effectively or to differentiate itself from competitors. To support business user needs and the rapid speed of change, IT organizations need a flexible composition environment. In particular, this composition environment must support rapid development and deployment of adaptable user interfaces, applications, and processes. And to enable asset reuse, this composition environment should be based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure that supports loose coupling of components (for example, UIs from backend systems).

In today's rapidly changing world, companies require flexible business processes that enable efficiency and competitive advantage. Yet, it can be difficult to manage business processes effectively for several reasons. First, there is often a lack of business process transparency. Many companies lack a central business process model for LOB and IT, thereby leading to discrepancies between business needs, functional and technical specifications, and actual deployment. Second, business processes are often fragmented across organizational departments and others in the business network. As a result, IT organizations need an effective business process management (BPM) environment that supports both system and human-centric processes. They also need tools for modeling, analyzing, automating, and monitoring business processes.

With a business process platform enabled by software and services from SAP and our partners, IT organizations can implement a technology infrastructure based on SOA to enable greater flexibility. This enables IT organizations to build composite applications quickly using enterprise services that enable specific process steps. In addition, IT organizations can integrate applications to support end-to-end processes and manage those processes across the business network. As a result, companies ensure process flexibility and integrity when responding quickly to business change.

Implement an Infrastructure for SOA for Greater Flexibility

SAP provides essential technology needed to enable process integration and composition using a standards-based SOA infrastructure. With an Enterprise Services Repository, IT organizations can store the definitions of enterprise services, process components, executable business processes, and integration scenarios; model, design, publish and discover reusable services; and mange the governance of service-enabled applications. SAP also provides an enterprise services bus that enables direct communication between applications that provide and consume enterprise services. Finally, SAP tools provide support for Web services standards that enables managed communication between service-enabled applications.

Integrate Applications to Support End-to-End Business Processes

SAP and our partners help IT organizations integrate applications and data to enable end-to-end business processes using standards-based XML and WS-based messages. With prepackaged integration content – such as interface schemas, mappings, process definitions – business process experts can rapidly assemble new business processes. In addition, IT organizations can reduce costs using pre-built adapters and industry-standard protocols to integrate applications and improve business communication with partners. Finally, an open adapter framework supports connectivity across the business network.

Compose Applications to Enable Adaptable Business Processes

SAP helps developers create applications that support core business processes and drive competitive advantage. SAP supports composition at all levels in the development process, including service composition, data composition, user-interface composition, and process choreography to support rapid innovation. With a robust and lean standards-based platform, developers can build composite applications that combine the benefits of standard applications with custom-built solutions to enable business processes quickly, flexibly, and affordably.

Manage Business Processes to Improve Efficiency

SAP and our partners can help IT organizations manage complex business processes across the business network. Business process management features cover the full process life cycle, including design, execution, monitoring, analysis, and optimization. With model-based tools, IT organizations can connect processes between applications, automate business processes using the business execution programming language (BPEL) or central scheduling, and manage process controls, exceptions, and data flow. Finally, IT organizations can monitor running processes to improve their efficiency.