Enterprise SOA

What additional capabilities does ESA offer in terms of allowing business analysts to determine which revenue-generating services should receive additional resources?

The ultimate challenge for companies is to focus not only on the technical implementation and operation of enterprise services but also on the business semantics of their implementation. Successful technical deployment is one thing—did the service install correctly, is it properly load balanced, etc.—but it's up to the business analyst to ensure that there are no gaps in functionality at the semantic level (e.g., is a process component missing), and she will need the tools to determine this.

To support the business analysts who will be driving the lifespan of business processes and composite applications in the top layer of the ESA life cycle, SAP intends to add functionality to its operations and modeling tools that will reflect and prioritize service performance relative to its performance in business processes. Faced with a dilemma in which two processes are competing for system resources, business analysts and their supporting IT really want to know which process is most critical from a business perspective as opposed to a purely technical one. (In the starkest terms, which one is making the most money?) SAP will build the standards enabling that linkage of business semantics and technical information directly into SAP NetWeaver.