Mastering Enterprise SOA with SAP NetWeaver® and mySAP™ ERP

Chapter 1. ESA Is Coming

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is coming to your SAP landscape. SAP itself has been saying this for several years, ever since the company launched its Enterprise SOA / Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) strategic road map. Yet even today, many customers and SAP partners are still just getting started in terms of having a real strategy for effective adoption. One reason is that the change to ESA represents such a large undertaking for SAP itself. It simply took a while to get the first major ESA-based products to market. Now that the company has completed much of the initial delivery plan, there are plenty of ways for both customers and partners to get started.

If your organization is just beginning to plan for ESA, you may find there is a lack of a shared understanding internally about the major architectural change that your SAP landscape is about to undergo. Hence, there is often no sense of urgency on the part of management to address ESA other than possibly dealing with upgrades to mySAP ERP or adopting certain SAP NetWeaver components. Many tactical benefits are associated with tackling these projects, but if that is the extent of your ESA adoption efforts, it is sort of like buying a fancy new sports car to drive around school zones at 20 mph.

SAP’s ESA strategy is a large undertaking that encompasses many different business, technology, architecture, and product perspectives. The most important thing for every enterprise to recognize is that ...