Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) 

Enterprise Services Architecture takes Web services standards and services-oriented architecture principles and extends these to meet the needs of enterprise business solutions. It helps IT organizations leverage existing systems to build and deploy flexible solutions that support end-to-end business scenarios across heterogeneous landscapes. Enterprise Services Architecture addresses the business issue that most companies are facing – extending existing IT assets to support business change and innovation, while lowering total cost of ownership.

Enterprise Services Architecture is SAP’s open architecture for adaptive business solutions. The fundamental premise of Enterprise Services Architecture is the abstraction of business activities or events, modelled as enterprise services, from the actual functionality of enterprise applications. Aggregating Web services into business-level enterprise services provides more meaningful building blocks for the task of automating enterprise-scale business scenarios. Enterprise services allow IT organizations to efficiently develop composite applications, defined as applications that compose functionality and information from existing systems to support new business processes or scenarios. All enterprise services communicate using Web services standards, can be described in a central repository, and are created and managed by tools provided by SAP NetWeaver.

 

Key Characteristics of Enterprise Services Architecture

●     Enterprise Services Architecture extends the benefits of Web services to enterprise business scenarios, by aggregating existing systems functionality into business-level enterprise services.

●     Enterprise Services are modelled from an “outside-in” perspective.

While the core set of enterprise services identified by a company may be substantially enabled by legacy or enterprise applications (including those from SAP), they are not defined or constrained by SAP or any other vendor’s applications. In other words, Enterprise Services Architecture defines or models services “outside-in” for any application i.e. based on business events relevant to enterprise business processes, not necessarily on an existing application or implementation. SAP will evolve its applications to support enterprise services designed for each business domain or industry that it currently addresses.

●     Enterprise Services Architecture offers a blueprint for enterprise-wide business process evolution, with complete investment protection.

Enterprise Services Architecture is a blueprint for a customer’s entire IT landscape, as well as an application architecture for SAP. Leveraging its breadth and depth of industry knowledge, SAP is defining a catalog of enterprise services that promote reuse of functionality across SAP solutions and third-party solutions. SAP expects that customers will independently select a core set of enterprise services needed to support their key business scenarios. They will then match these with enterprise services available from SAP, develop custom enterprise services where needed, and build flexible business scenarios by leveraging existing IT systems.

●     Enabled by SAP NetWeaver, Enterprise Services Architecture offers a gradual path to flexible, service-centric system landscapes.

Enterprise Services Architecture allows for gradual and non-disruptive transition of existing applications and architecture to higher levels of flexibility and value.

●     Enterprise Services Architecture allows new business processes to be developed, deployed and changed independent of existing applications.

“Consumers” of enterprise services are isolated from changes in applications that “provide” the service. Enterprise Services Architecture leverage an abstraction layer between the way an enterprise service is used, and the way the corresponding functionality is implemented within an enterprise application. This abstraction allows composite applications or custom UIs using the service, or its so-called “consumers,” to be decoupled from the applications “providing” the service. As a result of the decoupling, IT can leverage the rich functionality and best practices of enterprise applications to support new, innovative business solutions, and yet evolve these solutions independently of changes in the underlying applications.