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.
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."
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."
Technology Companies Provide Enterprise Services-Ready Solutions
Adobe
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."
Cisco
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
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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