Enterprise SOA

Acknowledgments

A book such as this one, which covers so many technical topics, must be a community effort. Actually, we produced this book with the effort of several communities. We interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside of SAP to create this book's content. Starting with engineers, product managers, developers, and solution marketers inside SAP, we then extended our research to customers, partners, and analysts. Perhaps the most inventive use of community came in December 2005, when we published early versions of certain chapters for feedback on SDN. This book at its best represents the wisdom about ESA harvested from all of these people.

And of course, many people deserve our thanks.

First, this book would not exist if Shai Agassi, Peter Graf, Ori Inbar, and Peter Zencke did not believe in the project and provide their enthusiastic support. Thomas Balgheim, Pascal Brosset, Archim Heiman, Franz Hero, Peter Kabuth, Klaus Kreplin, Jürgen Kreuziger, Carsten Linz, Nimish Mehta, Doug Merritt, Dennis Moore, George Paolini, Stefan Schaffer, Rolf Schumann, Emiel van Schaik, Vishal Sikka, Jim Hagemann Snabe, Klaus Weber, and Jason Wolf gave generously of their time and made valuable resources on their teams available to us.

Several people made especially large contributions to the book, and we would like to offer our sincere gratitude. Scott Feldman, Claus Fruehwein, and Isabell Jaeger helped us obtain the customer case studies. Scott Jones and the SDN team set up the SDN public ...