Section 18.8. How will ESA affect change management and software logistics?


18.8. How will ESA affect change management and software logistics?

The decoupling of business process logic from application functionality will lead to a profound evolution in change management, especially now that system downtime, that classic disincentive to software maintenance and upgrades, can be minimized if not eliminated outright.

In the current generation of software, potentially differentiating features that appear in each new version of a given release are inextricably tied to the bedrock functionality below. Any company considering an upgrade or a patch has had to weigh the financial and intangible costs (IT resources, the opportunity cost of downtime, etc.) against the potential advantages, and the more costly, critical, and complex the application, the less likely the company is to decide it's worth it. SAP's customers have stressed repeatedly that stability and continuous availability are key.

Decoupling the business layer from the application and business process platform layers frees each to evolve at its own pace. While the platform itself will not change rapidlyallowing companies to keep their mature systems in place, while ISVs such as SAP will continue to roll out new versions every 18 months as they have always donethe delivery and construction of new services and composite applications will likely become near-constant.

With the ability to ship products for the business layer rapidly and frequently, differentiating processes can be implemented and upgraded without having an impact on the application layer. In fact, as ESA continues its maturation, those services and business objects will drift downward to replace enterprise applications when they eventually reach the end of their lifespan. And because these services will contain the standard administration interfaces, IT will use SAP NetWeaver to automatically configure updates, analyze and pretest their potential impact on currently running systems, resolve conflicts and dependencies, and so on.

Software logistics will be transformed, as the rate of delivery and implementation will accelerate as the combination of service interfaces, SAP NetWeaver's centralized administration capabilities, and the adoption of specification model-style implementation and upgrade procedures reduce a formerly complicated and time-consuming procedure to a much simpler one, with little or no impact on the existing systems, greatly reducing TCO in the process.

18.8.1. What is the SAP NetWeaver Administrator? How will it adapt to the demands of an ESA environment?

The SAP NetWeaver Administrator (NWA) is a Web Dynpro-based tool for administration and monitoring, offering a central entry point to the whole SAP NetWeaver system landscape and enabling SAP NetWeaver administrators to perform all day-to-day operational tasks from within one console. The NWA unifies the most important administration and monitoring tools for Java and ABAP systems.

Based on a UI created in Web Dynpro, the NWA is fully accessible via a browser, and it consolidates previously separate tools for administration, troubleshooting, and problem analysis of the system landscape into a single environment. Using this tool, it's possible to start and stop instances, check configuration settings and logs, and monitor error-free functioning of components across the landscape for both Java and ABAP systems.

For Java, the NWA represents the crossover from various expert tools to an integrated, simple, and clear solution. It also completes the integration of the data sources for monitoring. For ABAP, the NWA represents the transition from many different expert transactionssome of which are difficult to useto integrated, centrally available information.

The NWA comes with an Operations Handbook containing a large collection of guided procedures for various operational tasks. An authoring environment for guided procedures makes it possible to extend the predelivered SAP guided procedures or to develop new ones. Its open framework permits continual integration of ISV solutions.




Enterprise SOA. Designing IT for Business Innovation
Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation
ISBN: 0596102380
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 265

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net