How are operations affected by ESA?
On the software side, the creation of a standardized set of interfaces for administrating and monitoring enterprise services will go a long way toward consolidating and eliminating the often redundant and expensive toolset in use today. By grounding these standards in ESA, it will become possible to fold all of the necessary tools for load balancing, ensuring uptime, scheduling, running diagnostics, and so on, into SAP NetWeaver for automatic administration. That is exactly what SAP is doing.
Standardization will enable SAP to meet the landscape challenge by collapsing formerly individual and isolated tools into the central SAP NetWeaver Administrator—the central operations console of SAP NetWeaver. This systematic consolidation, which is already underway, will lower TCO while creating the link between the business process logic and the operational metadata, which will cause the latter to become contextually self-aware.
In practice, that means having administration tools that will do the following:
Automatically recognize operational dependencies between services or composite applications
Allocate system resources to services using their importance to business processes as a method for assigning priority
Alert IT when service messages are not being received
Ensure those messages are not lost and can be rerouted and make contingency plans for surges in system activity
Consolidating the tool in a single, remotely accessible user interface (UI) will only ...