How does SAP help customers adopt ESA?
SAP's program for adopting ESA is a formalized yet flexible methodology that turns the journey toward an SOA into a logical series of steps. Each step involves a team of stakeholders, and together they can streamline and simplify an otherwise complex endeavor and provide an evolutionary path. With careful advanced planning and consideration of all risk factors—technical, economic, political, and so forth—disruptions are kept to a minimum.
The ESA Adoption Program SAP has developed reduces adoption to a series of four sets of activities. It is a cross-organizational approach designed to align business and IT, help customers keep costs in check, and shorten the time needed to create a versatile, powerful foundation on which to build ESA.
The program is divided into four phases, as outlined here and as illustrated in Figure 7-1.

Figure 7-1. Phases of ESA adoption
- Discover
The user organization endeavors to grasp the vision of an SOA in general and ESA in particular.
- Evaluate
The goal of this phase is to identify a first set of valuable enterprise services to build, framed as a short-, medium-, and long-term plan.
- Implement
A new composite application is constructed from the services identified in the evaluation phase.
- Operate
The value of the new architecture is showcased internally and externally, allowing other companies to see the new solution. ...