CIOL: What is the traction in the SOA business so far? What is the rate of SOA adoption among your customers in India as against the overseas?
SAP: We believe that our enterprise SOA offering is distinctly different from the plain SOA offerings in the market. SAP's approach to enterprise SOA goes beyond service-oriented architecture fundamentals by supporting business requirements through the use of enterprise services.

We call our strategy – enterprise SOA. At SAP, we have seen tremendous market adoption for our enterprise SOA platform with more than 13,760 customer deployments. SAP has delivered 1,000 enterprise services for the SAP Business Suite applications through the Enterprise Services Workplace site on SAP Developer Network (SDN). More than 2,000 independent software vendors are actively building applications on SAP NetWeaver. SAP today has eight industry value networks (IVNs) launched to support banking, chemicals, consumer products, high tech, mill products (forest and paper), oil and gas, public sector, retail and professional services. Today, we have more than 10,000 SAP consultants who are trained to support customers using SAP NetWeaver.

In India, we have over 250 customers who are currently leveraging our enterprise SOA solutions based on SAP Netweaver platform. Some examples include Reliance Communications, ONGC, Hero Honda, Bajaj Auto, The Times of India, Asian Paints, Mahindra and Mahindra, Trent and Barista Coffee Co. Ltd.

In India, we have 29 partners who work with us on the enterprise SOA front. These partners have developed 34 SAP xApps based on SAP NetWeaver. SAP Labs India runs SAP NetWeaver Center of Excellence to support SAP Partners in ramping-up their knowledge in SAP NetWeaver. The SAP NetWeaver competence Center at SAP Labs India provides development support to SAP partners to accelerate NetWeaver adoption in India.

CIOL: Have customers gone beyond the experimental stage to actual implementation?

SAP: Yes. Most of our customers are actively using our enterprise SOA and are already live and running.
CIOL: What are the business processes that are mainly impacted by SOA? 

SAP: Enterprise SOA revolutionizes the design of business applications, enabling the rapid composition of business solutions. With enterprise SOA, you can encapsulate business logic and expose it as enterprise services -- smaller functionality components that can be re-assembled quickly to compose new business solutions that meet changing business requirements. SAP’s enterprise SOA platform -- SAP Netweaver, provides an integrated platform of composition technologies for orchestrating business processes, composing applications, and deploying innovative solutions. All business practices can be composed into enterprise services and re-used. This helps in simpler IT as one need not start from scratch whenever a new application is composed.

CIOL: What is the key business advantage to be derived from an SOA setup? 
SAP: In our industry, we make custom built software and stand-alone software. However, everything is done from scratch. If you want to change something in the solutions, it is very difficult. Enterprise SOA allows you to have reusable parts in the solution. We could have similar setups in different areas like financial accounting system and procurement.

The partner is so important in this. We can define standards together with them for the space. Most applications are based on some service. However, if someone wants to change the latter, then having standards would help you change the solution part easily.

One of the most significant challenges facing companies today is the cost and complexity associated with building and maintaining connections between disparate IT systems. SAP has responded to this challenge by delivering SAP NetWeaver, an innovative platform that allows companies to easily integrate their application landscapes, including SAP and non-SAP systems. The platform allows customers to leverage their existing IT investments and, for the first time, combines application functionality with rich integration technology to serve as a company's foundational IT.

SAP's goal is to provide an easy path to platform adoption as part of a planned course of action and not as a separate project. Independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs), and customers can compose their own applications on the same platform that delivers SAP's core applications. This arrangement benefits everyone. Customers benefit because software products easily integrate with their SAP investments via the same platform. ISVs and SIs benefit as their development efforts are easier, their time-to-market delivery is faster, and they can connect into proven SAP technology and the SAP customer base.

CIOL: How SOA can enable businesses gain a strategic competitive edge?
SAP: Industry analyst firm Gartner estimates that by 2008, more than 60 percent of enterprises will use service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a guiding principle when creating essential software applications and business processes. SAP's approach to enterprise SOA goes beyond SOA fundamentals by supporting business requirements through the use of enterprise services.

Enterprise SOA allows companies to quickly build and modify business processes to adapt to rapidly changing markets. With enterprise SOA, companies can unify stand-alone processes to quickly compose new end-to-end processes, selectively redesign existing processes and facilitate seamless process design and execution across company boundaries to take advantage of business partners' expertise. Enterprise SOA unleashes the untapped potential of existing business processes within and across company boundaries.