Enterprise SOA

How does ESA affect implementation issues?

Even beyond configuration, the most important issue to be addressed in an ESA landscape is the possibility of conflicts, redundancies, and business process disruptions. As the granular complexity of the landscape increases with each service added, so does the possibility of something going wrong, and the ability of IT to debug or spot potential conflicts with the naked eye decreases proportionally. Furthermore, laboriously plotting the impact of a potential implementation by hand—i.e., configuring, testing, and debugging every single component that would be affected—isn't an optimal use of IT's time or resources.

SAP NetWeaver Lifecycle Management already does an excellent job of transforming high-level configuration instructions into granular application settings. But dealing with the flexibility inherent in an ESA landscape will require a still higher level of abstraction that would first include preconfigured and automatic initial setup of complete business scenarios. These would ideally shrink a six- to nine-month configuration process to an out-of-the-box installation preintegrated with SAP NetWeaver, with the latter being briefed by the installer on which components have been installed, which key performance indicators to monitor during operations, and so on.

A second aspect of this approach is a concept called business scoping. Scoping takes preconfiguration further, essentially installing a complete landscape of functionally that ...