The IT senario Enabling Enterprise Services belongs to the IT Practice ESA - Design and Deployment. SAP’s Enabling Enterprise Services IT scenario is a way of packaging the required capabilities, tools, infrastructure, and knowledge that companies require to extend their solutions by providing and integrating enterprise services into their business processes. At the heart of every business is a constant drive for growth.Companies can achieve this growth by adopting two fundamental strategies. They can drive top-line growth through innovation to realize a competitive advantage; and they can achieve bottom-line growth through efficiencies and increased productivity. The key problem your IT organization faces in supporting this growth is that, despite your best efforts, the amount of change that must be implemented in a given time frame continues to accelerate. Keeping up with your organization’s rapidly changing business requirements is becoming increasingly difficult. Further complicating matters is the fact that innovations that successfully differentiate your company today will inevitably be copied by your competitors and, over time, become standard practices. At that point, the emphasis shifts from innovation to determining how productively and efficiently you can run those routine business processes. This situation creates a dilemma for IT. On one hand, innovation is often supported by custom applications, usually built from scratch. On the other hand, packaged applications facilitate standardization while capturing best practices. Building new, customized solutions that support innovation is expensive and time-consuming because leveraging the functionality of your existing packaged applications is extremely difficult. And, as an innovative solution becomes a standard practice, you have to migrate this custom-built application into a packaged solution. The value of the process has changed, and this is reflected in its cost to the organization. To meet these challenges, IT organizations are investigating and implementing service-oriented architectures. A service-oriented architecture is a distributed software model that uses independent Web services to support business processes. These Web services can be used and reused in sequences defined by business logic to form applications that enable specific business processes. The constructs of the typical SOA approach, however, tend to focus exclusively on the technology framework — and neglect the larger business process. A combined focus on both application and infrastructure is needed to make this business-IT symbiosis work. SAP uses its business experience and enterprise software to provide exactly this combination: SAP’s Enterprise SOA is SOA plus something called enterprise services — aggregations of Web services glued together by business logic to help execute a business process. In other words, enterprise services are Web services that have an enterprise level business meaning. To get started with Enterprise SOA, companies must service-enable their enterprise’s applications. Service enablement refers to the isolation of an enterprise application’s specific functionality and its implementation through open standards to make the functionality accessible as a service. Such service-enablement is the basis for ESA-compliant applications. Enabling Enterprise Services in SAP NetWeaver adds business value to enterprises today because they can create new value from existing IT assets by making existing application functionalities available as a Web service. This enables companies to combine functions in a single process even if they are implemented in widely differing software components. Companies can also leverage the flexibility of implementation either in ABAP or Java by using the SAP NetWeaver infrastructure that supports both programming languages.
Preview Enterprise Services
To preview the enterprise services being built by SAP sign on to the ES Workplace on the SAP Developer NetWork (https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/developerareas/esa/esapreview). Based on the Enterprise SOA Preview System, the new ES Workplace lets you browse and test enterprise services.The ES Workplace allows you to drill down from industry to solution map to business scenario, all the way to the service and WSDL (from the ESR) for that service, as shown in the figure below. Customers, especially on the business side, can really see what enterprise services SAP has to offer for their particular industry or application area.
Enabling Enterprise Services - Scenario Variants
The Enabling Enterprise Services IT scenario includes the following scenario variants: Point-to-point, services-based integration This scenario variant provides for exposing ABAP and Java functionality on the SAP NetWeaver Application Server as Web services via Web services standard protocols.The service provisioning is done without mediation by an integration broker.. Brokered services-based integration This scenario variant enables you to run a Web service scenario using the integration broker as the integration/communication engine between the service consumer and the service provider.This especially makes sense if the additional capabilities of the integration broker will be used.
New Capabilities Available with SAP NetWeaver 2004s
The IT senario Enabling Enterprise Services provides the same functionalities for SAP NetWeaver 2004s as for SAP NetWeaver 04, i. e. there are no differences in the capabilities for this IT scenario.
