This year, SAP plans to ship a new release of the Process Integration functionalities of SAP NetWeaver. The current plan is to start the ramp-up of SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 in the second half of 2007. Depending on whether the target ramp-up KPIs are met, general availability will be around half a year later. This SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 release will be a natural evolution of the Process Integration capabilities of SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (2004s), which are based on SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure. It will be one of the key building blocks of SAP NetWeaver’s enterprise SOA technology. We believe that the Process Integration capabilities will be the cornerstone of our customers' SOA strategy. These capabilities will continue to be used heavily for middleware consolidation in customer landscapes, and will become the SOA backbone. This release will mainly leverage functionalities for service enablement and service and process orchestration.
Functional Highlights
Some of the planned new highlights for SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 are:
Enterprise Services Repository as a central storage location for enterprise service definitions and lifecycle management data for all enterprise services
Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) 3.0–compliant services registry for runtime management of enterprise services
Improved support for standards such as Web Service Reliable Messaging (WS-RM), WS Policy, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)
Extended support for high volume scenarios
Business Activity Monitoring for process definition of milestone monitoring (event correlation)
Improved SAP NetWeaver Administrator support for central configuration and administration of both mediated and point-to-point scenarios
Integration of human interaction (generic user decision)
WS-BPEL 2.0 preview
There are no major architectural changes in the new Process Integration release. This protects your investment in Process Integration in SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (2004s) or SAP NetWeaver '04. SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 is based on the next release of the SAP's application server with its ABAP and Java flavors. The Java stack is Java EE 5 compliant, and offers benefits such as faster installation and lower memory consumption. As in previous releases, the application server is the robust basis for infrastructure services such as scalability, high availability, archiving, security, and user management. SAP will offer flexible upgrade paths from SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (2004s) and SAP NetWeaver '04 to SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1.
More information
More details can be found in the PI 7.1 presentation about the major new capabilities that are currently planned for SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1. Further details will be provided in upcoming blogs in the near future. Furthermore, you are encouraged to attend upcoming events such as TechEd to learn more about the new Process Integration release.
Credits
I like to thank Sindhu Gangadharan and Thomas Volmering as well as the entire enterprise SOA product management team for their contribution for this blog and the presentation above.
