Enterprise SOA

What is the Enterprise Services Inventory?

As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the Enterprise Services Repository can be thought of in one sense as a container for descriptions of enterprise services. The Enterprise Services Repository is a directory, just like a phone book. And like a phone book, it is not filled with what it describes, but rather with information about what it describes. A person's phone number is not a person. Nor is the information in the Enterprise Services Repository describing the interface for a service the same as describing the service itself. The concern of this portion of the chapter is the services themselves, described in a way that a business analyst can understand. That's what makes up the Enterprise Services Inventory.

The Enterprise Services Inventory is a comprehensive set of business-level enterprise services created by SAP, though as we will see, the Enterprise Services Inventory is open and customers and partners may request services be built by SAP or submit services for inclusion in the Enterprise Services Inventory. (The process of adding to the Enterprise Services Inventory happens through the Enterprise Services Community, described in Chapter 6.)

The Enterprise Services Inventory is a key differentiator for SAP. It's one thing to say to customers, "Create an SOA," or even to provide the tools for doing so. In the case of SAP, the Enterprise Services Inventory represents a collection of enterprise services that come ready made. ...