We have to shift the focus to business now, it is not IT alone. What is key is that we help you educate your executives about what the applications and challenges are. This is the next thing: focusing and preparing the enterprise, he said. He said businesses of the future need to become specialists based on their core competencies, to provide innovation in terms of their business model and processes rather than just their products and services, and to digitize so they can embed software within processes and business models.
The challenge will be that although SAP has been talking about ESA for two years and rolling out several of the enabling technology components such as NetWeaver, xApps, and Master Data Management, it has been a hard and ongoing education process for the customer base. The result is that the company is way ahead of its customers. Given the scope and complexity of the change, this is no bad thing, but it does mean that SAP is now at the stage where it has to start getting widespread buy-in and adoption from the customer base. It is as much a customer transformation program as a SAP transformation.
While ESA is a concept, in that it describes a services based architectural design, it is enabled through technology, and SAP is building up the pieces that will give ESA shape and substance. The latest additions are 500 Enterprise Services that will be made available to customers, partners, and developers via a hosted site.
Although the services are based on existing SAP processes, the difference, according to the company, is that they are more complete and focused in that they are geared towards a particular task.
In addition, the use of web services definitions and standards is designed to make them easier to use, avoiding the main problem with traditional SAP APIs whereby it is necessary to understand SAP’s internal structure and semantics. The aim is to take process design out of the hands of the IT department, thereby avoiding a potential bottleneck, and put it into the hands of the business analysts, giving them the flexibility to respond to changes in the business environment.
Our customers will compete, not through innovation in products or services but via business models and processes, [and this is why] IT is important, because it implements the business processes, said Mr Kagermann. Flexibility and speed are key design criteria for the future and ESA is the way to go. That is also why NetWeaver is evolving into a business process platform offering facilities to compose composite applications as well as providing an integration platform.
SAP plans to lodge the enterprise services in a services repository so they can be accessed by external parties such as customers, partners, and ISVs, but did not reveal how they would be licensed. While SAP stressed that in the future, competitors would be able to develop rival services to run on ESA, it did not say whether it would host rival services within its repository.
One thing that jars in respect of SAP’s ESA message is that while the talk is of processes and business models and the breakdown of applications into discrete components that can be strung together to fit individual requirements, it is still talking in terms of applications. Even the enterprise services will be supported as applications. However, this is probably a result of the state of transition both SAP and its customers are in. SAP has a long-range vision as far as ESA is concerned, and is still in the early stages of education and demonstration. What it clear is that its vision of services oriented architecture, ESA in its terms, is streets ahead of its rivals.
