Mastering Enterprise SOA with SAP NetWeaver® and mySAP™ ERP

Chapter . Introduction

Welcome to Mastering Enterprise SOA with SAP NetWeaver^® and mySAP ERP™. This book takes you through the ins and outs of SAP’s Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) / Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) strategic road map. ESA affects SAP’s entire product strategy and technical architecture, which means many things to SAP customers and partners. As you probably know, it was a very big deal in the IT industry when SAP moved from a mainframe-based architecture to client/server computing with the launch of R/3. The transition to ESA is even bigger.

SAP is applying the last decade of IT advances to the next generation of business applications. This includes areas such as the following:

• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

• Business process management (BPM)

• Model-driven development

• User-centric computing

• Event-driven architectures (EDA)

• Infrastructure virtualization

• Modern approaches to enterprise architecture

All of these and more come together to support a new breed of SAP business solutions. As one enterprise architect put it, “We are moving from highly structured SAP systems to an unstructured SAP-world, and we’re not sure we know internally what that means or how to best deal with the change.”

Indeed, the new SAP architecture is based on the latest thinking in distributed computing. It offers many new options for how to define your landscape and tie together both SAP and non-SAP solutions. This book serves as a comprehensive guide to understanding SAP’s ESA-based ...