Enterprise SOA

What is the promise of ESA?

Looking back to the answer we provided to the question "What is ESA?" reveals that the answer so far has primarily explained the ESA technology architecture. The next question in this chapter refers to ESA at the application level, and the following chapter is devoted to exploring all of the questions related to understanding the business value of ESA.

The technology architecture came first because that is how most enterprise architects start their understanding of a new trend or idea. First they understand the mechanisms, then they understand what they can do with those mechanisms, and then they determine whether the trend has any relevance to their company's IT situation.

Based on all of the mechanics of ESA that we have explained thus far, we can summarize the likely benefits of systems created using ESA:

• Greater flexibility

• Expanded reuse of existing functionality

• Improved communication between IT and business

• Faster time to market through improved developer productivity based on model-driven development, removing IT bottlenecks

• Easier adaptation through modeling and role-based tools

• Clearly defined roles from the business analysts to the developers

• Better encapsulation to allow heterogeneity or outsourcing

• Lower TCO

• A foundation for an ecosystem

• A foundation for harvesting value from standards

For many SOA vendors, these benefits are promised without the sort of complete, top-to-bottom explanation that we are providing in this book.

But even though SAP's vision ...