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In my last blog I elaborated on recent experiences integrating a bespoke, pre-existing user interface with the SAP CRM product. We were able to deliver a pretty slick demonstration to the customer; the success of which owing, in no small part to the ESOA capabilities of the CRM product. It’s this fact that has got me thinking about the wider SOA capabilities of SAPs products and the vast potential it has for SAP customers.

Service Orientated Architecture (SOA)

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an established and proven approach to designing and implementing enterprise capable systems and it’s likely that, at the very least, you’ve already had a conversation about it. SOAs offer many benefits to customers and resulting architectures are often highly re-usable, extensible, interoperable and flexible. They realise greater ROI because they reduce the need for duplicated effort as new requirements emerge and can accommodate evolving business needs and processes without the need for significant rework and cost.

That introduction might suffice here, but it barely scratches the surface of this discipline which, whilst hugely relevant to the needs of modern business, can be both daunting and highly complex to those with little prior knowledge. A callous approach to SOA can result in cumbersome and inflexible architectures that can leave decision makers with the very problems that the architecture should have easily overcome. Fear not, SAP provides the tooling you need to get your SOA up and running in a best practise fashion, realising those all important benefits to your business.

SAP Tooling

To get you started, SAP have built the Enterprise Services Repository and Service Registry. The ESR provides the tooling to facilitate modelling, composition and orchestration of Enterprise Services that support relevant business processes, whilst the Service Registry enables the discovery of these services. The Service Registry is itself UDDI compliant. The Universal Description Discovery and Integration (or UDDI) open standard can be used by businesses to publish their web services in a discoverable and interoperable fashion facilitating both internal and/or third party integration through the provision of service metadata and WSDL file access.

SAP also provides the Enterprise Service Workplace, a web front end that gives stakeholders a friendly view, per SAP product, of out-of-the-box services offered from the ESR. The ES workplace is designed to complement the ESR by providing different perspectives on the services available allowing businesses and technical stakeholders alike to assess and prove feasibility within proposed or existing solutions.

Next Generation User Interface for Your Customers

I’d be writing for some time if I wrote about all the exciting places that your SOA enabled SAP business suite could take you to, but I’ll take this opportunity to focus on what I believe to be one of the most compelling: The vast potential for your customer facing applications that SOA enablement offers.

For example, Web 2.0 is fully upon us and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are now common place across the World Wide Web.  User experience is the order of the day and technologies such as Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, AJAX and more recently HTML 5.0 push the bar ever higher to deliver slick, responsive and engaging User Interfaces. These technologies offer a vast array of new and engaging capability for your customer facing applications and not only that, they thrive in SOA style architectures. By exploiting SAPs out-of-the-box tooling you can configure your SOA in a cost effective and timely fashion, allowing you to focus your effort where it matters: layering these technologies over your landscape to deliver next generation data driven applications to your customers.

Of course web applications are a subset in a field of many different types of user driven applications. Spend some time wallowing in the possibilities and I bet you’d be thinking of the potential for technologies in the Enterprise Mobility space and offline technologies such as Adobe AIR and so on. Why this is compelling for me is that these kinds of rich applications are becoming the de facto standard that users are becoming accustomed to and they can pretty much have them on their platform of choice (desktop, smartphone, tablet etc.). SAP’s commitment to ESOA enablement allows your business to take the reins, delivering market leading applications built on market leading technologies to your customers.