Enterprise SOA

Foreword

A humbling challenge now faces all of us in Information Technology (IT). In the past, our imaginations ran far ahead of what we could do with the state of the art. We could easily think of processes and applications that would be useful but that we could never build. Those who succeeded in making IT support a business did so because they understood the domain of the possible and did their best within those boundaries.

With the arrival of the Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), which is the acronym for an Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), IT now faces a dramatic expansion of the world of the possible. All of the things that used to be hard—designing and automating differentiating processes, adapting and optimizing existing processes, expanding the reach of applications to more users, integrating with partners—will become much easier.

Using services as building blocks is the first step toward ESA. Turning those services into a platform and ecosystem is the second step. This book will show the progress that SAP® is making toward creating a true business process platform supported by services.

The third step will happen in companies that put ESA to work. As a full inventory of services becomes available and companies are able to combine them, using modeling to compose user interfaces (UIs), processes, and information, IT will transform from an operational concern to a strategic weapon. The humbling challenge is that we will be limited more by our imaginations ...