SAP Sees SOA Linking Enterprises Across Borders

It’s been that way for some time, of course, certainly since SAP's introduction of its Netweaver technology. Now the software giant wants to see businesses taking the concept to the next level.

Bill McDermott, president and CEO of SAP Americas Inc., was talking up that next level at Goldman Sachs’ Software & IT Services conference earlier this month. McDermott referred to SAP’s enterprise SOA platform — of which the Netweaver integration technology is a prominent component — as “the epicenter of every sales engagement we have.” And he made the pitch for how businesses will be able to take advantage of SAP technology to deliver collaborative networks that extend not only across their companies but across those of their partners, suppliers, and customers.

He cited as an example a current engagement with one customer running MySAP Business Suite “with the stated goal of having collaborative networks with all their dealers and suppliers.”

According to McDermott, the customer is actually marketing the SAP platform to all their dealers and all their suppliers to service-enable business process, to ease the flow of information and commerce. McDermott sees this model replicating itself, and noted that SAP is now building an organizational infrastructure dedicated to making these collaborative networks easy to execute on.

In September, in fact, the vendor announced an agreement with Accenture to develop its Collaborative Health Network solution, due mid-2007, which it says is designed to help healthcare organizations improve patient care by streamlining the way they access, integrate and share information. Netweaver will be a foundational element of the solution.

“Together with Accenture, we look forward to delivering a comprehensive healthcare network solution, which integrates people, information, business processes, and technology standards to create collaboration beyond organizational boundaries,” said Thomas Shirk, president, SAP Global Public Services, in a statement announcing the initiative.

Business Spaghetti

Yet one small — well, maybe not so small — problem may bedevil the aspirations of organizations to realize these ambitions across boundaries. So much of the groundwork of such initiatives requires e-SOA principles to be embraced internally as a starting point.

“The problem that we face today is that SOA is a technical architecture pushed by the IT but not polled [sic] by the business side of the enterprise,” writes Natan Gur, Enterprise Architect at subsidiary SAP Portals Israel Ltd. in a blog posting.

He points out that SOA architectures can help re-architect the business side and solve what he calls “the business spaghetti” (i.e. business architectures gone awry). But business side buy-in is essential to make SOA adoption successful, in order to solve those problems — and, ultimately, to extend collaborative architectures.

The end message: Don’t SOA it alone. “If you’re running a SOA project or thinking about one you should have an enterprise architecture team that will support you through this process,” writes Gur. “Remember, without the ability to make business changes your SOA project will probably be doomed to fail.”