Enterprise SOA

ESA in action: Arcelor

One company actively using Java in its ESA implementation is Arcelor, and specifically its subsidiary, Profilarbed. Arcelor is one of the world's leading manufacturers of steel products for the automotive, construction, household appliance, and packaging industries. Formed in February 2002 by the merger of three steelmaking companies, Aceralia, Arbed, and Usinor, today Arcelor has annual revenues of 30 billion euros, with 95,000 employees in more than 60 countries producing 47 million tons of steel each year. Profilarbed is a subsidiary within Arcelor's portfolio of companies focused on the manufacture of steel sections and sheet piles for the construction industry. Profilarbed's IT department has created its own roadmap for the adoption of ESA with the goal being the rapid deployment of new services and composite applications in the pursuit of more flexible and efficient operations.

Profilarbed built its current IT landscape using SAP R/3 as the Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) foundation, and it chose SAP NetWeaver as the platform for creating and recombining services. Profilarbed has already realized 20 years' worth of cost and efficiency advantages from its SAP applications and sees ESA as the gradual, natural extension of its investment. The company has already begun identifying and building the necessary services for the composite applications it envisions building in the next few years. The short-term goal is to abstract and write services in ABAP, ...