Enterprise SOA

Chapter ELEVEN. SAP xApps Composite Applications for Analytics

SAP xApps composite applications for analytics enable people to take effective and timely action based on a thorough understanding of a business process and its context. By building on the ESA approach, SAP xApp Analytics help businesspeople leverage relevant information from wherever it resides, provide the analytic tools to gain a deeper understanding, and then offer the means to perform the necessary tasks or to collaborate with others.

SAP xApp Analytics fulfill ESA's mission to put more powerful, flexible, and role-based solutions in the hands of a larger population of users. In the past, users too often had to perform a context switch in order to take advantage of analytic functionality, or they had to rely on experts to do the analysis for them. The need to analyze a customer's credit profile or the patterns in past orders would arise, and to access information or to perform any analysis, businesspeople would have to leave the enterprise application in which they were working and do research and analysis using a reporting environment or an OLAP tool. Taking action required accessing an enterprise application, oftentimes not the same one as before, all the while being the "human integrator:" remembering key figures, actions, information, and people who need to be involved.

SAP xApp Analytics use enterprise services and standard application programming interfaces (APIs) to access relevant data and functionality. They ...