Customers Empowered to Accelerate Business Process Innovation Leveraging Enterprise Services on the SAP NetWeaver(R) Platform
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Leading organizations today are seeking increased agility through business process flexibility to anticipate changing business requirements more quickly. Enterprise services are the essential building blocks for this business process flexibility as they provide reusable pieces of application functionality that can be rapidly composed to form new or enhanced business processes. Based on widely accepted service-oriented architecture (SOA) standards, enterprise services represent a common business language that help customers increase the ease and speed at which they can be composed to support evolving business strategies and maintain the integrity of business processes. SAP will make these enterprise services available with SAP(R) applications running on the SAP NetWeaver composition platform as critical ingredients to help companies align around an enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA). Enterprise SOA is defined by SAP as SOA plus enterprise services-moving SOA from a simple standard to an architecture that drives real business value.
"As enterprise customers demand business agility in their new applications software, vendors are responding by embracing service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM). The result will be enterprise applications unlike any previous generation," writes John Rymer in the April 2006 Forrester Research report 'Oracle Versus SAP In Enterprise Applications: Let The Battle Of Architectures Begin!'. "SAP has strong market momentum, well articulated value for next-generation applications and a strong partnership strategy."
The new productized enterprise services pertain to common business functions such as financials, human capital management, procurement and logistics execution, product development and manufacturing, sales and service, corporate services and analytics. This allows easy composition of services to be completed by independent software vendors (ISVs), systems integrators (SIs), customers and SAP.
"Traditional IT platforms make the rapid development of flexible IT services nearly impossible," said Shai Agassi, president of the Product and Technology Group and executive board member, SAP AG. "While Web services and SOAs are helping customers move in the right direction, the real innovation is happening with the business-level building blocks that combine the benefits of Web services with business semantics that ensures business process integrity. SAP is leading this industry effort with its business-driven software architecture for services-based, enterprise-scale solutions. The delivery of 500 productized enterprise services is a critical step for customers who are eager to implement open and flexible business process strategies."
With today's announcement, SAP is also unveiling the enterprise services workplace, an enterprise SOA exploration tool available on the SAP(R) Developer Network ( https://www.sdn.sap.com). The workplace features the new 500 enterprise services and serves as a hosted environment for partners, developers and customers to collaborate on the definition and direction of enterprise services that will help companies run their most prevalent business processes in new, more effective ways. The enterprise services workplace is the next evolutionary step of the enterprise services architecture preview system introduced last year. (See the April 26, 2005 press release, titled "SAP Previews More than 500 Enterprise Services.")
SAP NetWeaver is the leading platform in the market today, continually evolving to offer a wide range of benefits including enabling more flexible business strategies, accelerating innovation and growth and driving greater overall IT and business value. The latest release builds on strong customer adoption with more than 31,000 deployments of SAP NetWeaver components, with more than 6,800 customers worldwide having chosen SAP NetWeaver as their strategic platform.
About SAP
SAP is the world's leading provider of business software*. Today, more than 33,200 customers in more than 120 countries run SAP(R) applications -- from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small and midsize enterprises to suite offerings for global organizations. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver(R) platform to drive innovation and enable business change, SAP software helps enterprises of all sizes around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. SAP solution portfolios support the unique business processes of more than 25 industries, including high tech, retail, financial services, healthcare and the public sector. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol "SAP." (Additional information at < http://www.sap.com >)
(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning and related applications such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, product life-cycle management and supplier relationship management.
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