Enterprise SOA

Why is an ecosystem of companies and standards so important to ESA?

As ESA adoption spreads, services will begin to proliferate. SAP will provide them, other vendors will provide them, customers will build their own, and so on. As the number of vendors and users expands, it will become increasingly important for commercial vendors to design services that meet their customers' specific needs. SAP has created the Enterprise Services Community (ES-Community) as a way for all sides to give feedback on the design and specifications of new services in order to guarantee the highest quality before delivery. It also provides a setting to ratify services that become de facto standards so that organizations can begin using them to create integration processes.

SAP realizes that it will never create all of the services its customers need. It hopes that by creating a flourishing ecosystem around ESA, specialized developers will step in to fill the gaps profitably and help create a universal inventory of services (see Figure 4-13). You can find more information about the partner ecosystem in Chapter 6.

Figure 4-13. Empowering partners to build xApps