SOA

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture )

Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (Enterprise SOA), its relevance in a business environment that calls for flexibility and innovation and the stages of adoption: discovery, evaluation, implementation and operations.

It's a world where the levels of competition are constantly reaching new levels and local markets are becoming global in nature - a world where mergers and acquisitions are the order of the day and business uncertainties are frequent. Changes in government legislation and departmental organization structure result in changes in business processes and the business applications that support them. Research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit highlights and identifies the following two key attributes of leading businesses in 2010:

1. Flexibility: Adaptability in responding to changes in market and customer demand will be central to companies efforts to create long term value

2. Innovation: Allied to flexibility will be the capacity to innovate, not only in terms of developing new products and services for huge growth markets, but also in terms of business models.

In such an environment, enterprises need a highly agile architecture that gives them the ability to adapt to these changes and lead in an uncertain market. They need an architecture that gives them the capability to drive innovation while consistently reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) year-on-year. Doing this cost effectively calls for an infrastructure that is based on open standards and service oriented to allow for easy management of new and existing assets. This architecture should easily integrate existing processes, support new processes and should have the flexibility to embrace new industry standards. For example, deployment of SAP NetWeaver® to integrate business applications (including but not only SAP ERP) has been shown to significantly reduce costs for customers and provide a very attractive return on investment. SAP NetWeaver XI® is based on industry standards that help organizations eliminate costly point-point interfaces that had been created to meet their unique needs.

In the current business climate, Service Oriented Architecture(SOA) has emerged as a potentially attractive solution for helping enterprises to become more flexible achieve the vision of a collaborative and process centric organization. Designed from a services perspective and implemented as a set of loosely coupled systems, a SOA can help
enterprises integrate disparate applications. In the opinion of the authors, however, most deployments of SOA to date have involved the reuse of custom-built application components and deployment of service oriented infrastructure. This has required a significant change in application development practices and management structure. The return for such projects has struggled to overcome the costly initial investment.

Enterprise SOA will become more compelling when:

• Enterprise applications that support critical business processes are service enabled

• Applications can be composed and then recomposed using services that are taken from these proven enterprise applications as well as those which are custom developed

• Desktop applications are service enabled; offering tangible productivity improvements for the everyday user

SAP NetWeaver® - the backbone of Enterprise SOA

Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (Enterprise SOA), Sap’s enterprise grade SOA is realized with SAP Net Weaver®. Enterprise SOA supports all key aspects of a SOA; but there are two important differences. While each component in SAP Net Weaver® can be deployed individually to offer a particular solution, the real power of the platform is holistic integration of "People, Information, Process and Applications" . The same platform also provides the capability to develop composite applications on the fly on top of the existing applications. These composite applications can reuse functionality and information from existing systems to support unique business specific needs. SAP Net Weaver® also provides tools for development , process modeling, configuration, execution and monitoring in a unified platform. SAP Net Weaver® will house a repository of Enterprise Services - valuable Web Services for the enterprise. By using SAP Net Weaver®, enterprises can innovate and lower their cost of ownership by minimizing coding and reducing integration efforts.

Having understood the general benefits of an Enterprise SOA, let us look at the key steps that enterprises may take for evolving the traditional IT architecture. SAP does this through a comprehensive SAP Enterprise SOA Adoption Program that helps enterprises implement all the core elements of an Enterprise SOA.

Stages of Enterprise SOA Adoption

As each organization is unique, the SAP Net Weaver® strategy must be evaluated by considering the existing IT landscape, business requirements and future goals of the company. Sap’s Enterprise SOA Adoption Program features four discrete steps. These are Discovery, Evaluation, Implementation and Operations phases.

Discovery: Grasp the vision

Leaders from both the IT and business units participate in interactive
sessions to identify opportunities in which an Enterprise SOA can help in reducing the TCO and improving efficiencies.

Evaluation: Build your own roadmap

This phase consists of a series of steps that organizations must
undertake to transform their existing technology landscape into a flexible IT landscape that is built for addressing current and future business needs. The key steps in this phase include:

• Create Customer Enterprise SOA Guidelines
• Business & IT Landscape Analysis
• Enterprise SOA Potential Analysis
• Enterprise SOA Design
• Enterprise SOA Strategy and Roadmap Definition

Implementation and Operations

• Enterprise SOA Enabling Roadmap Workshop
• Enterprise SOA Roadmap Workshop
• Plan Services
• Build Services
• Run Services Grasp the Vision
• Enterprise SOA Opportunity Workshop
• TCO Discovery Session Show the Value
• Continuous Operations and Governance