Enterprise SOA

Will the ES-Community create new standards?

No, the service definitions coming out of the ES-Community are not standards in the same sense as the outputs of other industry and technical standards bodies (such as OASIS, the W3C, and RosettaNet). The community creates service definitions targeted at the SAP platform that SAP's customers and partners will adopt broadly. There is the potential for the ES-Community to work through a liaison relationship with other standards bodies as needed. This liaison relationship would enable the community to take advantage of any preexisting standardization work, ensuring that new definitions are not reinventing any preexisting successful innovations.

Most industry standards groups determine a standard in a fairly abstract way that is available for implementation on any platform. At that point, the SAP community has the chance to tweak the standard so that it works as efficiently and effectively as possible with the SAP platform while still meeting the original standard's definition. A typical opportunity for this kind of tweaking occurs when a standard's original definition is purposely vague. By being more specific about how the standard ought to work within the context of the SAP platform, the community creates the best possible version of it for the use of the entire SAP ecosystem.

It's also important to understand that the community provides SAP with feedback and input on more than simply Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files. The community ...