Mastering Enterprise SOA with SAP NetWeaver® and mySAP™ ERP

Chapter 16. ESA Today and the Road Ahead

This book has provided an end-to-end perspective on SAP’s strategy for ESA. Part I described the major business and technology changes motivating SAP. These have influenced the company’s overall product direction, beginning with the integrated SAP NetWeaver platform, the latest mySAP Business Suite solutions, and the delivery of new composite business applications. The trend will continue as SAP unveils a fully ESA-enabled set of platform-based business solutions.

Part II described the major technology and architectural considerations supporting ESA. This included an understanding of SOA and BPM, along with the value of taking a strategic approach toward creating your unique adoption road map and the importance of enterprise architecture and governance in that process. Part III looked inside various SAP NetWeaver tools and technologies that help enable the user-centric, process-driven, analytics-based composition aspects of ESA.

SAP has laid out a clear road map for ESA and the foundations of the Business Process Platform (BPP) are in place and ready to use today. More important, you can predict how SAP-based solutions will continue to evolve based upon the ESA strategy and other industry developments well into the future.

The purpose of this chapter is to serve as a summary of the major elements of the ESA strategy, to review the usefulness of current SAP product releases, and to consider how things will evolve as the next wave in the overall ...