eSOA Mashups Don't Have to Cost A Fortune:
How to Find Success with SOA and NetWeaver BI
Unabridged Edition, Never Before Released
by Jon Reed 

In the October/November 2007 Edition of the SAPtips Journal, I wrote about how Enterprise SOA (eSOA) has the potential to "turn ERP on its head." I'm not going to take back those predictions, but I do have to acknowledge that eSOA comes with some drawbacks. The upfront investments in architecture, governance, and organizational change - all necessary to build a true eSOA platform - can be daunting.

Flagship SAP customers already running on NetWeaver 7.1 and ERP 6.0 are in a better position to experiment with the potential of SAP eSOA, which was intended to run on top of the latest SAP releases. But what about the rest of us? One of the under-reported stories in the eSOA space is how companies can take advantage of SOA now, leveraging their existing BW/BI infrastructure and the power of third party "mashups."

In this article, I'll take a closer look at a whole different way to pursue SOA. Along the way, I hope to poke holes in a few assumptions about how to approach SOA, and to offer a view of how companies can build SOA momentum through projects that have a near-term impact on bottom line objectives.

Following my attendance at TechEd, I recorded a "TechEd in Review" podcast with Krishna Kumar of Enterprise Horizons. I invited Krishna to join me on this podcast for two reasons: first, because he has as good a grasp on SAP's technical evolution as anyone in the market. And second, because his company has been an innovator in the area of third party mashups, spatial analytics, and leveraging the value of SOA through the BW/BI infrastructure.

Let's take a closer look at some of the insights Krishna shared in the podcast and how he approaches the eSOA space.

1. Why The ROI for eSOA is Elusive

In my view, SAP did not make a compelling ROI case for eSOA at TechEd 2007. SAP made a big deal at TechEd about how the entire mySAP Business Suite is now service-enabled. But when you look beyond the hype, service-enabling core ERP transactions can be problematic from an ROI standpoint. I expect to eventually see a strong ROI case for how to utilize eSOA on core ERP, but there are issues pertaining to compliance and security that make the ROI case more of a challenge in the core areas. Beyond that, there are other established integration technologies, such as EDI, that already handle some of the work that eSOA could do in the core ERP modules. So to a degree, the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" issue is a factor in the enterprise core.

On the other hand, the real power of eSOA comes into play on the analytics side, where the ROI case is clearer. As Krishna put it, "eSOA comes with the promise of totally blowing away the enterprise collaboration ecosystem. But the flip side is not everything is eSOA-enabled. Transactional systems cannot be eSOA-enabled with the ease with which analytical systems can be.
 
As I see it, SAP is over-emphasizing the service-enablement of the core ERP suite, which usually requires a major organizational investment and overhaul to take advantage of, while under-emphasizing the value of service-enabling BW/BI, which can be done more "on the fly" for immediate project wins, generating some momentum for bigger eSOA projects by putting BI-driven SOA to work now.

I asked Krishna to say more about the problem of service-enabling the core ERP suite: If you look at SAP's Enterprise Services, you will see reams and reams and reams of services that are exposed, with a lot of complexity behind the scenes. To create a simple sales order, I really just need four things: I need quantity, value, the customer buying the product, and what he is buying. But if you look at SAP's Enterprise Services, there are probably 300 fields out there. Who on earth is going to have the knowledge and the appetite to learn these 300 fields over the Internet Cloud."

During our podcast, I asked Krishna to explain the phrase "Internet Cloud." He defined it as follows: "With the proliferation of the Internet, you basically now have a computing layer between different computers. The computers are all connected to each other through the Internet. But the fact that now we have self-running services-through eSOA, through Google analytics, through Yahoo analytics-your Internet is not a passive ecosystem anymore. It is a live, intelligent breeding ground for computing power. That collectively is represented as an Internet Cloud. So an Internet Cloud is an ability for computers to talk to each other and an ability for smart business processes or smart systems to exist in ether.

"This to me is a kiss of death," Krishna continues. "You cannot have an Enterprise Service with the complexity of an SAP system. Enterprise Services have to be simple. So I go back to my earlier point that Enterprise Services don't make good transactional systems. Enterprise systems make great analytical systems. For example, if I were to search my sales orders, all I would really need to put in is my customer number and the date, and lo and behold, it comes up with my order status. Analytical applications are much easier to consume, they're a lot more nimble, and they're highly configurable."

Krishna points out that to some extent, conventional approaches to eSOA are trying to solve a problem - communicating across corporate firewalls - that has already been solved. "To answer a question like ‘Is eSOA hype?' It really depends on what angle you're looking at," says Krishna. "If you're looking at eSOA as being the de facto plumbing technology for performing transactions, it is absolutely hype. There's very little value. EDIs have existed historically; EDIs do a great job of communicating across firewalls. You don't need a new plumbing technology to communicate across firewalls. But if you're asking, "Is eSOA a great analytical tool?" - absolutely. EDI and cross-enterprise communication platforms do not enable nimble transfer of analytical data; eSOA comes with the promise of being able to transfer analytical data across the firewalls."

Another point Krishna did not make in the podcast, but that Vishal Sikka, the CTO of SAP, acknowledged during a closed TechEd interview session, is that service-enabling the enterprise core carries with it both security and compliance-related challenges. The security challenges of controlling access to sensitive data over the Internet are obvious. Compliance comes into play when you consider, for example, service-enabling the financial areas within ERP. As Vishal pointed out during our TechEd interview, the worst case scenario for improperly handling financial data is jail time for executives. Vishal certainly believes in the potential of eSOA, but he does not take the necessary precautions lightly.

2. The True Power of eSOA is Found In Third Party "Mashups"

The consensus between these viewpoints is not that SOA is impossible within the core ERP context. Rather, as the business cliché goes, the "low hanging fruit" lies elsewhere. In this case, the low-hanging fruit is service-enabling SAP analytics. Before we return to the specifics of how this can be done, let's consider one more powerful aspect of "SOA on the fly": third party "mashups."

The phrase "mashups" has already become an e-Business buzzword du jour, but in our discussion, what we are talking about is the ability to mix ERP data with third party content to generate a whole new view of the information we have gathered. Too often, the focus of eSOA has been on how to pull data out of ERP in order to build "composite apps" that run on top of the ERP system and perform specific Internet-based business processes.

Composite apps are nifty, to be sure, but there is a learning curve and an upfront cost in learning how to expose your core data to customers and suppliers through automated services. The exciting thing about "mashups" is that we are talking about taking data that is already gathered, in this case, within BW/BI, and simply combining it with third party data from "best-of-breed" content providers. The data sharing is easy because the same XML-based standards are already in play.

One of the most common examples of such a content provider is Google Maps. But the Internet is full of industry-leading firms that are now exposing their data via their own XML-based APIs. This opens up a very powerful way of pulling in cutting edge information, such as demographic data from ACNielson, and "mashing" it with your internal ERP data for intelligent number crunching and trends analysis.