Enterprise SOA

How will ESA affect change management and software logistics?

The decoupling of business process logic from application functionality will lead to a profound evolution in change management, especially now that system downtime, that classic disincentive to software maintenance and upgrades, can be minimized if not eliminated outright.

In the current generation of software, potentially differentiating features that appear in each new version of a given release are inextricably tied to the bedrock functionality below. Any company considering an upgrade or a patch has had to weigh the financial and intangible costs (IT resources, the opportunity cost of downtime, etc.) against the potential advantages, and the more costly, critical, and complex the application, the less likely the company is to decide it's worth it. SAP's customers have stressed repeatedly that stability and continuous availability are key.

Decoupling the business layer from the application and business process platform layers frees each to evolve at its own pace. While the platform itself will not change rapidly—allowing companies to keep their mature systems in place, while ISVs such as SAP will continue to roll out new versions every 18 months as they have always done—the delivery and construction of new services and composite applications will likely become near-constant.

With the ability to ship products for the business layer rapidly and frequently, differentiating processes can be implemented and upgraded without ...