Mastering Enterprise SOA with SAP NetWeaver® and mySAP™ ERP

Chapter 5. Understanding SOA Foundations and SAP’s ESA Infrastructure

Thus far, you have seen the big picture behind SAP’s strategy for ESA. Technology and integration platforms are merging with applications into a new breed of “applistructures.” SAP is making major architectural changes through the implementation of a standards-based SOA platform in NetWeaver, and by morphing its mySAP Business Suite applications to run on top of this new infrastructure. Customers and third parties can extend the SAP platform both for their own use, and in more official ways through helping participate in ecosystem activities such as IVNs and the ES-Community.

As SAP continues evolving its products into an end-to-end business process platform, the underlying architecture will continue to become more integrated, process-driven, and service-oriented. That, in turn, will enable whole new categories of composite applications to be built on the platform. But what does it mean when SAP says its products are SOA-enabled? After all, SOA is a relatively new computing model (at least in terms of its realization by newer Web Services technologies). That means a number of standards and technical capabilities are still in the early stages of development.

A related question is what makes SAP’s approach to SOA unique? The short answer is that SAP’s ESA road map is driven by the needs of business processes and applications such as mySAP ERP. Tackling things from a top-down business solutions approach is very different ...