Section 20.1. How do standards relate to ESA?

20.1. How do standards relate to ESA?

ESA is an approach to building complex IT systems by, in essence, selecting and assembling a set of building blocks known as services. As with any building blocksfired-clay bricks, steel beams, or children's plastic blocksthere is much to gain from having all of them relate to, interact with, and connect to each other according to a set of precise and stable rules. Rooting the design and operation of these blocks in agreed-upon standards ensures a speedier design process, faster implementation of designs, and reduced need for maintenance: in short, lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

For physical blocks, these rules define shapes, angles, and sizes, the position of screw holes, and the patterns for dovetailed joints. In software, these rules, or interface standards, define the formats, content, and sequences of messages that building blocks, or services, are to exchange with each other under different circumstances. By standardizing these rules, or interface standards, across the enterprise, across IT systems, and ultimately across networks and ecosystems of business partners, the flow of information and the coordination of activities can be made much more efficient and effective. Moreover, the pervasive use of standards brings into being a new culture, or environment, in which to conceive, plan, and deploy IT.

Indeed, standards also help to remove longstanding barriers and facilitate the continuing alignment of business and technology strategies. Because it relies on standards-based interfaces up and down the technology stack, ESA makes it easier to compose new applications quickly. Existing enterprise services can be linked together, and if some new enterprise service is required, standards again facilitate its creation and assembly. The bottom line is that ESA brings enormous flexibility and the ability to match IT structures to business strategy. Likewise, since each enterprise service will be defined with equal input from business and IT managers, it will naturally embody the enterprise's thinking and approach to certain problems.

20.1.1. Isn't standardization between disparate brands of systems and between independent companies easier said than done?

In a literal sense, yes, standardization is much easier said than done. ESA is not magic. But it is, in fact, something quite new in the history of IT, a way of understanding, planning, and deploying sophisticated systems that finally unleashes the power of IT standards in ways that can help enterprises to reinvent the way their business operates and achieve business and technology goals that until now have appeared quite unreachable.

In a way, ESA is all about standards. It is designed from the ground up to fully exploit the power of IT standards to leverage existing technology investments, to improve developer productivity, and in turn, to lower the cost of developing, operating, and evolving the largest, most vital systems within an enterprise. This is a power that to date remains largely untapped.

ESA's deep reliance on standards frees the enterprise to think about, select, and refine the information that it needs to share in the execution of its businessinformation that it will share both within its own organizational boundaries and outside those boundaries, with its suppliers, business partners, and customers. Without standards, a great deal of energy must be spent on such basic tasks as making sure data is delivered in the right formats and figuring out how to get messages from point A to point B quickly, reliably, and securely.

IT standards come in many flavors. ESA brings them together and unlocks their inherent and collective value. A useful analogy can be made to rigging up a stereo system. Without standardized plugs and standardized signal levels in connecting wires, every home hi-fi system would have to be custom designed, perhaps requiring a full-fledged audio engineer to choose mutually compatible CD players, amplifiers, speakers, and so forth. The cost would likely be so high that only a few people would bother. Instead, audio products adhere to a stable set of technical standards that enable just about anyone to assemble components to achieve a particular set of goals (quality, amplification, economy), regardless of brand or internal design. Anyone can create a system that produces good if not superb sound. Indeed, because these standards were so well thought out in the first place, it's even possible to add entirely new kinds of componentswireless boxes streaming MP3 tracks from a distant PC, for instanceto stereo setups that were first put together during the era of turntables and vinyl LPs.

Now, the history of the software industry has largely been one of defining successive sets of standards, each one attempting to tame complexity by carving systems into manageable building blocks: macros in Assembly language, subroutines in FORTRAN, code libraries in C++, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), and so forth. With each new genre of building block, software engineers sought to hide complexity and mind-numbing details to make it easier for programmers to construct larger and more functional systems.

ESA continues this tradition but elevates the approach to a much higher level of abstraction. By relying on (and hiding from view) a greater number of moving parts, as it were, ESA's building blocks are more powerful than those that have been available before. The difference is that ESA operates at the business rather than the technology level. ESA breaks down most previous barriers encountered in enterprise software, making it possible to create and stitch together blocks of functions, or services, which may execute on different computers operated by entirely different enterprises at vastly distant points on the globe.

None of this would be possible, though, without ESA embodying and enforcing the use of industry-defined standards to the degree that it does more than any previous software architecture. Equally important, ESA sets the stage for profitable exploitation of new IT standards as they emerge over time.

20.1.2. What kinds of standards does ESA rely on?

ESA encompasses and builds on three distinct categories of standards: technology, semantics, and portability. Figure 20-1 illustrates these categories. Let's examine each one briefly.

Figure 20-1. Portability, technology, and semantic standards

In order to create new enterprise services, developers must rely on certain programming methods, tools, languages, and interfaces. Together, these elements create a development environment that can ensure interoperability and reuse at many levels. Meanwhile, the basic interaction between any two enterprise services brought into play under ESA will be an exchange of dataa sequence of messages, that is, passed from one service or IT system to another. To make this possible, the two services need to share a standard way of talking, which is set forth in a variety of standards around the concept of web services. Along with ESA's programming and development tools, these standards provide the foundation of ESA's technology standards. You can find more about web services in Chapter 14.

Simply moving data from here to there is not enough, of course. The interactions between sender and receiver must take place in the proper order, according to a well-defined sequence upon which each party agrees. The message itself must be interpreted correctly, as it moves from one system to another. On top of that, a complex message may contain several types of data, and the systems need a way to extract one needle of data from a haystack of information. This is where so-called semantic standards come into playprecise rules that define what data, markup language, or "words" each message should contain and at which point during an exchange to send those messages.

Finally, it's of great value to customers if they can choose to create and deploy their applicationsand enterprise serviceson the IT platform that they deem best for the job. They can make this choice based on any criteria that are important to them: cost, compatibility with some piece of software already installed, or performance, among others. Portability standards address this issue and provide customers with greater freedom of choice in procuring hardware and software, now and in the future.

20.1.3. What is SAP's general approach to standards?

For 30 years now, the SAP name has been virtually synonymous with IT standards. The company prides itself on vigorously supporting and participating in all aspects of the standards-setting process and, equally important, on incorporating industry standards in all of its many software products. Indeed, SAP currently employs its own SAP NetWeaver composition platform, which embodies a wide range of IT standards, to create all of its service-oriented products and solutions.

Industry standards ensure that SAP NetWeaver integrates smoothly with other vendors' solutions and that the platform can align people, information, and business processes. Standards help to ensure accurate sharing of information, to improve the reuse of technology, to improve developer productivity, and to lower the cost of developing, operating, integrating, and maintaining IT systems.

Consider this. Without standards in place, it is difficult for different IT systems and organizations to exchange business documents, whether those documents are invoices, the definitions of web services, or digital certificates providing cryptographic protection of data. Without standards that define what information should look like and what it means, correctly understanding and processing that information becomes extremely difficult.

Likewise, when standards exist, the business logic and software required to process shared information needs to be developed just once. After that, the software can be used repeatedly. The same is true of skills: the use of standards means the technical skills that developers acquire will remain valuable for a longer period than would be the case otherwise even in those instances when developing new software is unavoidable.

SAP has long been an active supporter and contributor to the IT standards-setting process, using its decades of experience in building business applications to lead and influence many standards groups. SAP takes leadership positions in organizations such as the W3C, OASIS, OMG, Java Community Process (JCP), Eclipse, and the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) and actively participates in many of these organizations' working groups. To help make sure that solutions incorporating the standards defined by these groups are able to interoperate, SAP also leads the WS-I Sample Applications activity and conducts interoperability tests with competing platform vendors such as Microsoft and IBM. SAP has taken a particularly strong interest in defining semantic standards, identifying them as critical to integrating business applicationsthat is part of why semantic standards are the foundation of ESA.

20.1.4. Does ESA provide support for every major IT standard?

No, ESA does not provide support for every major IT standard. In fact, SAP has deliberately chosen not to implement every standard available. It has chosen to leave certain standards out of ESA because, based on its long experience in IT, the company recognizes that not all standards provide the right kind of value. Therefore, SAP focuses on choosing standards that will help businesses build the solutions they need, that guarantee interoperability with major platform partners.

Some of these standards may not be as widely accepted as others are. By throwing its support behind certain standards, SAP expects that it will be able to help them along and make them more widely accepted over time. One example of this is the Core Components standards put forward by a United Nations e-business standards group. Core Components, as we will describe further along in this chapter, bring significant value to customers and, yes, to SAP's internal development teams, too.