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Tech titans to provide ESA Ready solutions

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CIOL Bureau
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BOSTON: SAP AG today announced that the market leaders in hardware;

networking; data storage and management; security; intelligent documents;

desktop productivity applications; forms and user experience technologies;

testing and system management are aligning around Enterprise Services

Architecture (ESA), SAP's blueprint for a business-driven approach to

services-oriented architecture (SOA). Adobe, Cisco, Computer Associates (CA),

EMC Corp., Intel, Macromedia, Mercury, Microsoft, Symantec and VERITAS will

license ESA to provide "Enterprise Services-Ready" solutions that will

deliver on the promise of Web services by providing enhanced flexibility,

greater speed, lowered costs and diminished risk. The partners' commitment

provides clear evidence of significant market adoption of and momentum around

SAP's approach to next-generation customer architecture. The announcement was

made at SAPPHIRE® '05, SAP's international customer conference, being held

in Boston, Massachusetts, May 17 — 19.

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In today's fast-paced business environment, companies face the challenge of

implementing a flexible IT infrastructure that supports ongoing change and

business processes innovation. Such flexibility is the promise of a

services-based approach, and this architectural shift is a key marketplace trend

in the computer industry today. SAP's vision of a shift to a services-based

approach was first introduced in 2003 with the unveiling of ESA. Since then,

more than 1,500 reference customers have begun the process of service-enabling

their business processes across their entire IT landscapes by implementing and

using SAP NetWeaverâ„¢, the industry's first platform to successfully

demonstrate the convergence of applications and infrastructure that enable the

ESA blueprint.

Now, in the wake of this initial customer success, industry leaders have

announced that they are working with SAP to identify opportunities to leverage

the ESA blueprint. By agreeing to license ESA from SAP they receive early access

to SAP's growing catalog of technical information on enterprise services, the

tools and capabilities to work with the architecture and development information

such as data schemas, user interfaces, application models and security features

necessary for the automation of business process on top of enterprise services.

Enterprise services are Web services that capture the language of business,

collaboratively defined by SAP, its customers and its partners. In addition,

these ESA eco-system partners will also receive fully-featured development and

run-time tools that allow them to immediately build, test and certify Enterprise

Services-Ready solutions.

These leading organizations are focusing on enterprise services as the common

denominator to ease deployment and co-operation of technologies across the IT

stack in order to reduce the risk and cost for customers. By extending

application functionality deep into the IT stack, SAP is making the entire stack

"business process aware."

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The result of this market-shifting collaboration of the IT industry's

leading companies will be the availability of products and services that will be

branded "Enterprise Services-Ready," built along the ESA blueprint,

that leverage the power of enterprise services at all levels of the IT landscape

and thus make the entire technology stack "business process aware."

This awareness helps organizations design, deploy, run and maintain innovative

business processes at lower cost and higher flexibility. The

rising tide of Enterprise Services-Ready solutions and the industry support for

ESA as the enabler of flexible, next-generation business solutions are viewed by

industry insiders as a logical evolution in the market's move toward SOA.

"This announcement represents a major shift in market dynamics across

the IT industry," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal, Enterprise Applications

Consulting. "The significance of these industry leaders working together

cannot be understated. A technology platform around common enterprise services

that can solve deployment, integration and operational challenges is of major

importance to customers and technology companies alike."

"Today's announcements from the industry's leading technology

companies provide significant endorsement of enterprise services as the language

of business and the tipping point of the customer evolution to ESA," said

Shai Agassi, president of the Product and Technology Group and member of the

executive board, SAP. "This new level of application awareness will provide

customers with enhanced simplicity and integration to dramatically reduce the

costs and complexity associated with IT management. SAP is the only solution

provider to bring together all the necessary elements to make this architectural

shift happen-an overall enterprise-scale architectural blueprint with ESA, an

enabling platform in SAP NetWeaver, an available repository of more than 500

enterprise services that ISVs can leverage to build solutions to meet customer

demand, and the power to collaboratively bring together the IT industry's

leading players-and all of this is not a set of promises for the future, it is

happening right now."

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Technology Companies Provide Enterprise Services-Ready Solutions

Adobe

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Today, Adobe delivers one of the first Enterprise Services-Ready technologies

through its Interactive Forms delivered as part of SAP NetWeaver. This is the

first of many document services to come that helps companies further extend

information in enterprise systems within and beyond the firewall to reach

customers, partners and employees.

"By ensuring that our Interactive Forms are Enterprise Services-Ready,

we have harnessed the power of Web services to help our customers drive enhanced

communication across the extended enterprise," said Shantanu Narayen,

president of Adobe. "This is just the start in the creation of innovative

Adobe applications that leverage SAP's powerful technology infrastructure to

deliver a rich enterprise-application experience to SAP customers."

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Cisco

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Cisco, the market leader in networking, aligns well with ESA through its

vision of the Intelligent Information Network (IIN), which provides significant

new value in optimizing business applications and IT processes. For example,

through the combined power of ESA and Cisco IIN, customers can build a

scalable and highly available deployment through SAP-aware capabilities in the

network, securing inter-application communications transparently

in the network and providing this support across various application protocols.

Cisco also plans to work with SAP to seamlessly integrate SAP® Business

One capabilities as part of its next-generation network in order to

simplify software and hardware deployment.

Computer Associates

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Building on its strategic partnership with SAP, CA will deliver a wide range

of solutions that will enhance the ability of enterprises adopting ESA to

implement, secure and manage their business computing environments while

reducing TCO. CA will leverage its Enterprise IT Management (EIM) software,

ensuring that it is Enterprise Services-Ready, to support more than 27,000 SAP

customers. CA also plans to develop composite applications on top of the SAP

NetWeaver platform that will leverage core competencies between SAP business

applications and CA's business service management components and will expand

the portfolio of existing SAP® xApps™ packaged composite applications (see

related press release titled, "CA Supports Enterprise Services Architecture

from SAP with Integrated Management and Security").

"Just as ESA simplifies the complexity associated with the development

and ongoing modification of increasingly intricate process workflows and data

dependencies, CA's EIM simplifies the complexity associated with management of

increasingly intricate service environments and their underlying IT

infrastructure," said Rob Levy, senior vice president and chief technology

strategist at CA. "Together, ESA and EIM uniquely enable customers to

aggressively evolve their enterprise systems in pursuit of competitive advantage-while

giving them full control over performance, security and operational costs."

Intel

Intel is collaborating with SAP to drive development and scaling of

Enterprise Services Architecture. Enhanced query performance is a key element on

a technology road map that conforms to ESA. Intel has innovative technology

coupled with insight into how companies are implementing services-oriented

architecture that can help customers address the tough challenges of moving to

these environments (see related press release, titled, "SAP Teams with HP

and Intel to Deliver Breakthrough Business Intelligence Flexibility and

Performance").

"SAP and Intel have broad customer bases and share a strong focus on

understanding and meeting the needs of enterprise customers," said Renee

James, vice president and general manager of Intel's Software and Solutions

Group. "We're working together in the areas of virtualization,

manageability, business intelligence and RFID to bring the next level of

enterprise services to customers across a range of Intel platforms, from

Itanium® 2 to 64-bit Xeon™ to Centrino™ mobile technology."

 

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