Enterprise SOA Landscape Design: Future Included

Enterprise SOA Landscape Design: Future Included By Martina Gruhn, Journalist, Munich, Germany

The Enterprise SOA Landscape Design consulting service shows companies how to mold their legacy IT landscapes into modern, service-oriented architectures. Designed by SAP Consulting and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, it takes account of both applications and hardware.

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) today are seen as the key to heightening the responsiveness and agility of an IT landscape. These attributes are essential because, as experts agree, the requirements that corporate IT systems need to meet are growing at a blistering pace. Application systems and infrastructures should become more flexible to match the unremitting tempo of change in the business world.

Yet the reality is very different. Most company IT infrastructures have evolved over time to accommodate specific applications and are ill-suited to keeping step with changing business conditions and new processes. And there is another problem: Even if it wanted to, a company cannot renew an entire hardware and software landscape in one fell swoop. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to incrementally re-designing a disparate IT environment.

This is where the Enterprise SOA Landscape Design consulting offering comes into its own. From inventorying the existing stock of software and hardware to designing a target architecture, SAP Consulting and Fujitsu Siemens Computers guide users along a four-phase road map that leads them to a service-oriented IT future.

The concept for this offering, which alternates workshops with evaluation and analysis phases, was devised jointly by SAP and Fujitsu Siemens Computers. “This ensures that the software and hardware in the target designs we propose dovetail to the greatest extent possible,” explains Maik Schmalstich, an SAP Consulting lead.

The modularity and flexibility that the service oriented architecture SOA offers at the application level must be supported by virtualization and automation at the infrastructure level. Without a dynamic technical backbone, an IT infrastructure cannot achieve the agility it needs. A well-rounded SOA concept must include measures to make the IT hardware more dynamic. The new approach offered by the two IT partners consists of four phases:

Evaluation of the solution portfolio

Working with the customer, SAP architects analyze the company’s IT strategy and business environment. They gather information about strategic initiatives, the applications affected by these initiatives, and the existing solution landscape (SAP and non-SAP), and then report where improvements would be beneficial.

Analysis of the technical infrastructure

In this phase, experts from Fujitsu Siemens Computers examine the existing system landscape to determine its future requirements. They then hold a workshop to discuss aspects such as data migration, data backup, printing, data exchange, job control, process continuity, network and system administration, archiving, load profiles, and bottlenecks. They formally document the results in a workbook.

Design for the target landscape

Based on the results of the first two phases, the consultants draw up several possible design variants and compile the solution portfolio required for each. They analyze the alternatives and discuss possible synergies and solution-specific requirements. At a further workshop, the consultants explain the pros and cons of each option and recommend the design they consider most suitable.

Road map

Following a feasibility study (validation service) and risk analysis, the IT architects draw up a project schedule that plots the route to the new landscape and describes each milestone. In a final session, the consultants present the road map and highlight the critical success factors.

“This new offering combines our expertise with SAP’s to show customers exactly how they can put an enterprise SOA service oriented architecture in place,” concludes Dr. Dietmar Krauss, SAP Alliance Manager at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. He expects the average project to be completed in three to four weeks. “This model is aimed principally at midsize companies and corporations, all the way up to the top 100 German companies.“

Krauss attaches particular importance to involving users in every phase of landscape design. In the past, managers from customer data centers met with consultants from Fujitsu Siemens in one place, and SAP consultants talked with application managers in another. Now, joint workshops achieve a vital, but sometimes difficult feat: They get the people responsible for hardware, software, and specialist areas sitting around the same table. After all, the only way to find the best solution is to combine the knowledge and requirements of everyone involved.

SAP outlines its SOA strategy

SAP outlines its SOA Service Oriented Architecture Strategy - Seeking smoother, faster app upgrades... by Martin LaMonica

SAP on Tuesday detailed product developments meant to smooth the process of upgrading to the latest generation of its modular business applications.

Shai Agassi, president of SAP's product and technology group, outlined the software maker's plans to technical executives and developers at its TechEd conference in Las Vegas.

He announced SAP Discovery System, a collection of software components meant as a "starting point" for a services-oriented architecture (SOA), a system design meant to make SAP's applications more modular and flexible.

In addition, he said, the company will shift its product release method to make upgrades faster.

Rather than release large-scale updates of closely interlinked components, SAP will release more narrowly defined packages every quarter or two, Agassi said.

These packages will address a certain aspect of SAP applications, such as human resources or travel management, and customers will have the choice to install them or not.

All the packages will work with MySAP ERP 2005, the core set of automated business processes in SAP that the company plans to leave in place for five years.

Agassi said: "You will have a stable core you can build on and continue to enhance. It drives the ability to flexibly innovate at your pace. When you get services from us, you can decide how to use them in ways that we didn't think about."

SAP is trying to encourage customers to upgrade to the most recent editions of its applications suite, which has been rebuilt around an services-oriented architecture SOA. Once customers adopt this "business process platform", they will be able to more quickly develop innovative software, Agassi said.

SAP Discovery System is meant to be a relatively simple way for customers to start adopting SAP's latest service-oriented suite of applications.

It includes the NetWeaver infrastructure software, Java-based tools for creating services, and a set of sample applications. SAP released a preview version of the package on Tuesday, Agassi said.

Also at the event, the company's executives gave updates on products under development, including a search engine called SAP Enterprise Search.

A preview download is now available and the software will be available next year. It has been built so it can be embedded in different applications, such as human resources apps or in a front-end user interface screen, Agassi said.

He added that the next version of SAP's portal, code-named Project Muse, will use Ajax-style development to improve the navigation of SAP application's screens.

Agassi also announced that a group of SAP customers and partners have formed a community of experts to share technical information and techniques pertaining to the consumer products industry.

Agassi said SAP, through its partnership programme, expects to create expert communities in all 26 industries it supports in its applications.

10 steps to SOA

10 steps to SOA - Service-oriented architecture begins and ends with business process marshaling a sprawling set of technologies along the way. Don’t know where to start? Try Step 1
By Oliver Rist

SOA is an idea, not a technology.

True, SOA (service-oriented architecture) builds on the stack of protocols that define Web services, but it is hardly limited to that stack and draws as much on time-honored notions of business “re-engineering” as it does on XML, SOAP, and WSDL. Simply put, SOA is a broad, standards-based framework in which services are built, deployed, managed, and orchestrated in pursuit of new and much more agile IT infrastructures that respond swiftly to shifting business demands.

The breadth of that vision is what makes service-oriented architecture SOA seem so maddeningly vague. Nonetheless, the potential benefits of reduced IT costs and greater business agility have spurred many organizations to start down the path to service-oriented architecture SOA, to the point where most large enterprises now have some sort of SOA initiative under way. One reason for that extraordinary traction: SOA service-oriented architecture may ultimately have a transformative effect on the entire enterprise, but in contrast to other “big bang” endeavors, most of the applications and infrastructure you’ve already deployed can remain in place.

Throughout the past two years, InfoWorld has interviewed countless enterprise architects, developers, and officers who are guiding their organizations toward service-oriented architecture SOA deployment -- and who are learning hard lessons, gaining insight, and encountering infuriating technology gaps along the way. Many are already enjoying service-oriented architecture SOA’s early benefits of easy integration and code reusability. Based on their experiences, and the advice of industry technologists and analysts, we offer this step-by-step guide to planning, building, deploying, and managing an SOA service-oriented architecture.

As you’ll see, service-oriented architecture SOA provokes many of the same questions that dog most grand IT schemes. Should you buy and deploy service-oriented architecture SOA-related technology from a single vendor with which you already have a close relationship, or should you mix and match best-of-breed solutions? And, as with any standards-based initiative, what do you do when many of the standards necessary to achieve the real benefits aren’t fully cooked yet?

Such questions lack easy answers, and missing pieces of technology, industry disagreements, and vendor lock-in all threaten to dampen service-oriented architecture SOA’s much-ballyhooed benefit of hyperagility. Nonetheless, you’ll find most of the key concepts underlying SOA, a number of which may be familiar, right here -- although not necessarily in exactly the right order for you. Just as with service-oriented architecture SOA itself, how you put it all together depends on what you’ve got and where you want to go.

Road to SOA: SAP to address customer pain

Road to SOA Service Oriented Architecture : SAP to address customer pain by Robert Westervelt

SAP is packaging software and consulting services to steer customers on a smoother path to a service oriented architecture (SOA) and ease the learning process of its NetWeaver development and integration platform.

SAP unveiled an Enterprise Services Architecture Adoption Program that will give customers a series of educational workshops and tools to build a roadmap for using NetWeaver to establish a complete service oriented architecture SOA. The program is being offered in conjunction with SAP products that are built on NetWeaver.

The Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) concept was introduced by SAP in 2003. It was used to showcase NetWeaver and how companies can upgrade their architectures in a step by step process to build an SOA service oriented architecture.

The workshops will take into account specific company architectures and develop a tailored plan to move to an SOA service oriented architecture. A total cost of ownership discovery session is also included.

SAP is in a foot race with its competitors, Oracle Corp. and Microsoft, to develop products that support an SOA, according to analysts. Getting customers familiar with its NetWeaver platform and educated about its ESA strategy has been the theme emanating for several years from SAP's Waldorf Germany headquarters.

With a saturated ERP market, making inroads by developing an open architecture could create new business for SAP, analysts say. As Oracle Corp. combines the software code it acquired from its recent merger with PeopleSoft, developers on what Oracle calls "Project Fusion" must migrate the code to a more open environment, said Paul Hamerman, vice president of enterprise applications at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.

"SAP is further along in its SOA build out strategy than Oracle at this point," Hamerman said. "Fusion is based to a large degree on the code that exists in the E-Business Suite, so developing an open environment will not be easy for Oracle."

SAP hopes a better educated customer base will get more customers developing composite applications and SAP's Master Data management technology. Over the next three years, SAP will dramatically accelerate the revamping of its products, said Jim Shepherd, vice president of research at Boston-based AMR Research Inc.

"The vision of breaking the enterprise application suite into a portfolio of configurable process components has been a key part of SAP's strategy for many years," Shepherd said recently in a research brief to AMR clients. "The company believes it is very important to quickly complete the transition to an [SOA] before competitors like Oracle or Microsoft can bring their next-generation products to market."

Composite apps, called xApps by SAP, snap into place on top of the existing applications its customers may have, regardless of platform or vendor. Composite applications pull together relevant data from across a company's applications and should result in streamline business processes, said Ori Inbar, vice president of product marketing, for SAP NetWeaver.

"By now people understand the value of an SOA and know that it's not easy and want guidance on how to do this," Inbar said.

The ESA Adoption Program will be provided initially by SAP Consulting, but SAP plans to eventually allow its partners to conduct the workshops.

"Changing your architecture into a service oriented architecture is not something you do over night. It's a journey," Inbar said.

Source: http://searchsap.techtarget.com