Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) and NetWeaver matter for your business
Growing a successful business is a perpetual journey which needs information technology (IT) support. These days you seem to have to worry about business partners’ systems as well as your own. Too often technology seems to hinder almost as much as it helps you on that journey. The next release, the next project will fix ‘the problem’. Too often IT still does not arrive at the place the business needs. This is no longer acceptable.
11 November 2005
Publication
In order to make effective decisions businesses require joined-up information derived from disparate internal and external sources. Business processes often have to spread beyond your own organisation. Business partners expect you to be able to interact with them electronically – often using pre-defined industry standards.
We have seen large-scale Enterprise solutions vendors like SAP provide wide-spread access to huge libraries of best-practice business processes; yet implementing these systems alone has not addressed many of the issues of the past. Too often the major packages have seemed like huge, closed worlds; accessible only with seemingly ‘secret’ specialist knowledge. Whilst these solutions can be internally flexible, the points of connection to other systems have often been brittle, complex and expensive to maintain. New standards, which have been evolving since the .com days, promise better connectivity and integration, but only custom-built solutions and niche packages have been able to take full advantage them so far.
Two things have changed this completely. First, the standards have matured to a point where they are sufficiently mature and accepted to be useful – along with the supporting technologies. We now have useful standards around user interaction, information integration and standardisation, even systems integration itself is becoming standardised. Standards alone are not enough – support for them has to become widespread.
Second, the world’s largest application vendors are clearly committed to supporting these new capabilities. SAP, perhaps first among these, is delivering a new architecture – Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) – and technology tools, such as NetWeaver. These allow SAP solutions to integrate at all levels in a standard way with other existing systems.
ESA and NetWeaver have been designed to ensure that you can start to take advantage of many capabilities by deploying NetWeaver components alongside existing SAP and non-SAP solutions.
Two big changes result:
1) Significant business value is being delivered more quickly providing better
integrated solutions. Not only inside your business, but with your business partners
as well. Projects are now measured in months not years
2) The new technology is making new business capabilities available which were
not cost-effective, or even possible, before.
Recently, we implemented a new NetWeaver-based solution in a manufacturing company, which supported the full range of internal business processes. Furthermore customers can now place orders directly and securely over the Web, and receive a promised delivery date at the time the order is placed. They can also track the order throughout its life. This was all delivered using the standard functionality of the SAP solution. For the larger customers even more was possible. They can place orders electronically from their own purchasing system, receiving real-time acknowledgements and delivery dates. Standard SAP support for industry standard message formats (using standard NetWeaver capabilities) made this possible. The new system was delivered and productive within nine months. New business capability is being added at intervals of between three and six months. The result: higher levels of customer service at much lower cost.
This is a basic example of what can be achieved using ESA and NetWeaver. To work in the connected world you are going to need technology like this to help you compete. You have a choice: you can build on the software infrastructure offered by pure technology vendors or you can use pre-built business content deployed on standards-based platforms like NetWeaver. For a while you may need both.
Even if you have relatively mature SAP solutions, you may be able to get benefit
from this new technology now. However, as with all technology, you must have a
plan for how your present and planned IT capability will help you on your business
journey.
