SAP Unveils Comprehensive SOA Service and Support Offering to Leverage Strength of SAP NetWeaver® Technology Platform and Further Simplify Path to SOA

SAP announced that it has delivered a complete accompaniment of service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies, ready-to-run services and comprehensive support offerings to help companies achieve additional business value and increased IT efficiencies

With SOA as the de facto market standard and mass adoption underway, customers can turn to SAP for a simplified, comprehensive option for executing a sound SOA strategy that delivers rapid value. The breadth of offerings from SAP addresses the full lifecycle of SOA projects — from development to deployment and ongoing management — making the transition to SOA easy and affordable. By taking advantage of hands-on guidance through SAP's methodology, customers can accelerate business network transformation. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® 2008, SAP's international customer conference, being held in Berlin, Germany, May 19-21.

Small, midsize and large enterprises around the world face the need to drive a more global approach to business, manage faster transformational changes in market conditions and cope with increased customer power in networked economies. As a result, companies are continually looking for ways to innovate business processes while reducing the amount of expense, time and effort associated with driving the operation of their business. Companies need a comprehensive architecture that is based on an open platform to govern their IT landscape in order to enable change, and are increasingly adopting enterprise SOA to fill those needs. Enterprise SOA, SAP's approach to SOA, focuses on easily linking stand-alone standard processes to quickly compose new end-to-end processes. In addition, the approach selectively redesigns existing processes to make rapid changes and facilitate seamless design across company boundaries to include business partners.

"SAP's approach to SOA has enabled Öffentliche to improve customer management for further growth, as well as made us more efficient and effective," said Dennis Lidzba, managing director IT, Öffentliche Insurance (Versicherung Braunschweig). "Through the use of Web services, we are able to provide our customers with online processes and our partners with an online environment where interfacing with different systems is flexible."

End-to-End Professional Services for Scalable Business Solutions

The set of innovative professional services and tools offered by SAP ensures customers have the ability to complete their SOA road maps and move forward on projects, maximizing success at every step. The professional service portfolio from SAP covers all phases of a company's transition to SOA — from initial exploration to training end users to take advantage of newly introduced functionality. The portfolio includes:

• Starter Kit for Enterprise SOA — Released recently, the starter kit for enterprise SOA provides step-by-step guidance for initial SOA projects with knowledge building blocks including content focused on value and benefits, architecture, governance, composition of services and ongoing operations. In addition, the kit contains a methodology for project managers and hands-on developer guidance. To learn from other user experiences, references and customer cases are included as well. This kit is available at no cost to customers via the SAP Developer Network site (sap.sdn.com — https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/enterprisesoa)
• Methodology for Accelerated Transformation to Enterprise SOA — The methodology accelerates the transformation to SOA by helping consultants, partners and customers implement service-based solutions. The methodology supports and accelerates the transformation of customer IT landscapes into an enterprise service-based architecture, consolidates existing approaches and provides end-to-end guidance throughout the entire transformation process with a single procedural model.
• Packaged Composite Implementations — Providing customers with value-add SOA offerings that address specific business problems, each offering comes as a packaged SOA project, including a composite application, relevant productized services and comprehensive documentation. These offerings ensure faster time to value and are ideal to leverage the benefits of SOA.
• Value Prototyping — Provides a comprehensive high-speed collaboration platform to create custom-tailored prototypes. This service comprises a one-stop shop, combining business, industry, solution and technology skills into a holistic approach to outline and bring to life customer-specific SOA value.

SAP Consulting, Custom Development and Education Maximize Customer Success

Customization is a primary characteristic of SOA projects. Through a combination of offerings from the SAP Custom Development and SAP Education organizations, customers can leverage existing investments and accelerate value gains in their business as they develop composite solutions that differentiate themselves in the marketplace. SAP's offerings address the full lifecycle of an SOA strategy to best position the project for success.

Professional services from SAP Consulting include:

• Advisory and Value Services — Demonstrate the benefits of enterprise SOA to customers, identifying potentials for their business and creating an action plan.
• Design and Development Governance — Released earlier this year, the enterprise SOA design and development governance offering from SAP ensures process integrity and enables customers to more rapidly experience tangible business benefits as a result of an enterprise SOA strategy. Enterprise SOA governance ensures structure, discipline and control from a generic perspective while addressing the requirements of each company in a specific view according to the customer's situation.
• Enabling and Implementation Services — These services educate users and build up skills for the planning and execution of SOA projects. In addition, these services help customers through the implementation of enterprise services bundles and composite applications.
• SAP Custom Development — This organization delivers individually tailored enterprise SOA-based composite applications, customer-specific enterprise services and related support offerings. In doing so, the organization helps to shorten concept and design cycles and reduce development time while minimizing technology and execution risks.
• SAP Education — With a newly launched certification program in 2007, SAP Education focuses on enterprise SOA governance, design, modelling, composition tools and best practices for critical roles such as enterprise architect. The training builds on existing SAP skills and also brings more SAP-certified professionals to the market to meet the increased demand for talent for SAP customer employees and partners.

"Over the last few years, we have seen SOA move from a concept to reality with customers, due in large part to the comprehensive set of offerings from SAP," said Bernd-Michael Rumpf, global head of Field Services, SAP AG. "Complementing the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, SAP's tools, applications, services and a robust ecosystem of partners enable customers to develop a sound SOA strategy and execute on it. With additional ways of enablement like the enterprise SOA starter kit or the methodology for accelerated transformation, as well as comprehensive support offerings that have been developed over the last year, customers can more rapidly and easily derive business benefits like greater flexibility in our rapidly changing global business environments."