Foreword

Ahumbling challenge now faces all of us in Information Technology (IT). In the past, our imaginations ran far ahead of what we could do with the state of the art. We could easily think of processes and applications that would be useful but that we could never build. Those who succeeded in making IT support a business did so because they understood the domain of the possible and did their best within those boundaries.

With the arrival of the Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), which is the acronym for an Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), IT now faces a dramatic expansion of the world of the possible. All of the things that used to be harddesigning and automating differentiating processes, adapting and optimizing existing processes, expanding the reach of applications to more users, integrating with partnerswill become much easier.

Using services as building blocks is the first step toward ESA. Turning those services into a platform and ecosystem is the second step. This book will show the progress that SAP® is making toward creating a true business process platform supported by services.

The third step will happen in companies that put ESA to work. As a full inventory of services becomes available and companies are able to combine them, using modeling to compose user interfaces (UIs), processes, and information, IT will transform from an operational concern to a strategic weapon. The humbling challenge is that we will be limited more by our imaginations and our ability to grow and manage change than by the constraints of what is possible.

IT will play a new role. Instead of managing the complexity and innovation of the technology, IT staff will manage the complexity and promote innovation of business processes. The chief information officer will transform into the chief process innovation officer. For this transformation to take place, technology will change, and so will the organization.

The goal of this book is to explain ESA so clearly and completely that companies take the idea off the shelf of promising ideas and start putting it into their project plans.

ESA is the next major architectural paradigm, following the rise of client/server, and then Internet-based applications that came before. But unlike the previous paradigm shifts, where the focus was primarily on how the technology was changing, ESA is as much, or even more, about how to organize a business.

With both the business and the technology sides thinking in terms of enterprise services, a thicket of communications problems disappears. Businesses can model their processes in terms of high-level process components assembled into scenarios. Then they can easily flesh out such models into detailed processes powered by enterprise services that provide gateways to business objects. Thick, hard-to-understand requirements documents become outdated. The models become the requirements.

The silos in organizations and applications will recede in importance. Processes, not applications, will now be at the center of everyone's thinking. Innovation can rise again as a habit because by using ESA, businesses can implement new ideas affordably and in a timely fashion.

The build versus buy tradeoff also disappears, replaced with buy and extend. Unlike many proponents of more technically focused, service-oriented architectures (SOAs), SAP is not just delivering the tools to build services; it is delivering an entire inventory of ready-made services described in a searchable repository that makes them accessible for modeling. Once businesses buy ESA-based solutions, a process of building and adapting the service-based solutions can begin. Companies can easily shape solutions built on enterprise services to meet many more business requirements than solutions built using architectures of previous generations.

The key question we hear most often does not concern whether ESA will work. SAP has a reputation for solving the whole problem, and solving it well. SAP bases all of its applications on ESA. It builds all of its technology to deliver ESA. The future of SAP rests on the success of ESA. Yes, ESA will work.

The question we hear most often in our visits to customers and analysts concerns how ESA will work. That's what we've written this book to explain.

Of course, the best examples of how ESA will work come from our customers, who are unleashing the power of service-based IT into their industries. Companies such as SupplyOn are using ESA to make their auto-industry hub more useful and configurable. Companies such as Day & Zimmermann are using ESA to expand service offerings. This book is full of many such examples.

The days of the "my way or the highway" dictatorial software company are long gone. Large companies such as SAP cannot give orders anymore. But the resources and past successes have conferred on SAP the privilege of setting the context.

ESA is our context for creating business value with IT. ESA explains how SAP, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), systems integrators (SIs), and hardware vendors work together with customers to make IT work better for business. We are eager to make this concept work for you at your company.

Ori Inbar, Senior Vice President, Solution Marketing SAP NetWeaver, April 2006