Vendor agnostic web services help from SAP

SAP, the European business applications software leader, is seeking to help enterprises use more of web services in a cost effective way and not have to spend a bomb to overcome incompatibility of solutions from different vendors.

Towards this, SAP is seeking to give a greater thrust to its Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) which was introduced in 2003. It is SAP's Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for service based business solutions. For this SAP plans to reach out to independent software vendors to develop ESA-ready products and create application ecosystem.

ESA provides companies with technology to guide their deployment of web services at a business process level by unifying SAP and non-SAP systems in one architecture. By doing this SAP reduces the cost of creating and maintaining interfaces. This will enable enterprises to scale up the usage of web services.

Peter Zenke, member of SAP AG speaking at the inauguration of SAP TechEd, said SAP is the only enterprise application software vendor that is building service into its solutions and also providing a technology platform SAP NetWeaver (a service oriented application and integration platform).

He said that the company has to move from information technology to process innovation technology.

"For this the company has to identify and prioritise business process opportunities and create a dictionary of services, events ,roles and processes," said Zenke.

Earlier, IT companies used to invest almost 60 per cent of their income on operations but it has come down to 35-40 per cent.

The same is the case for consolidation where it has come down from 30 per cent to 20-25 per cent. "Now the investment for process innovation is increasing and it has increased from 10 per cent to 40 per cent," said Zenke.

The key advantage of ESA is that it allows development of applications that can bridge gaps between existing applications. This means an application when changed, all the interfaces and applications with this component of application need not be changed.