The Integration Strategy of SAP and Web Services 

Integration Between Different Systems

Business processes reach beyond system borders. This means that, as a developer of business programs, you often work with scenarios that cover several systems at one time. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to address functions – also called services – in another system or, viewed from another perspective, to be able to provide functions for other systems.  The strategy in this case is to provide the desired function as a Web service and to consume it on the client side as a Web service.

Web Services as Integration Strategy

Web services represent a communications strategy to be used within SAP NetWeaver as well as a strategy to or from an external source. This integration technology is based on open standards. With it, you can include existing functions – irrespective of whether they are implemented. You can also provide new functions as a service and then access them from other systems. Within the SAP world, you can provide BAPIs, RFC modules, Java classes, Enterprise Java Beans, as well as Idocs and XI server proxies as Web services. You can, of course, consume Web services from external systems also – regardless of the implementation supporting them.

What Are Web Services?

A Web service is a modularized function that can be executed independently. You can call a Web service from any system using a standardized protocol. We distinguish between the Web service provider – a server that provides certain services – and the Web service consumer, who consumes certain services as a client. When you call a Web service, you pass on input parameters and the data is returned to you in output form.