Prior to the era of mashups, companies would have had to build that third party demographic content internally at considerable cost, or purchase it externally and then grapple with integration headaches. Now, they can lean on firms that already make available the content they want to "mash" with. In many cases, that information is either free or surprisingly cheap, and it's accessible via Internet protocols, with no custom API logic required.

Krishna's company has enabled these types of mashups with a number of SAP customers. He has seen firsthand how creating these mashups with SAP analytics moves the discussion beyond eSOA hype and into the framework of a real SOA value proposition. I asked him to explain how this process can work:

"To make it simple, let's say I have a spread of customers in geography, and I need to understand which product is bought by what demographics of people and how good my inventory is by location to fulfill the demand for the different geographies. I could get a Google Earth-based dashboard. The CFO of a company, for example, can now view his entire enterprise ecosystem as a dashboard where the data comes from multiple third-party tools: Google, which gives you consumer data from the Internet Cloud; SAP, which gives you sales data from an internal BI system; and a market demographic service provider like ACNielson, which gives you market demand.

Just by viewing this dashboard and by actually slicing and dicing graphs on a map, I can get a pretty accurate picture of where my sales prospecting opportunities lie, where I can generate more leads, where I have, let's say, a revenue exposure because my inventory isn't necessarily compatible with the needs. In essence, we have built up a very powerful mashup solution that helps customers of SAP get the message across. They can look at this visually too. By looking at a visual mashup, an SAP executive can quickly aggregate data from disparate data sources and perform very powerful business optimization processes."

The name for the visualization of number-crunching is "spatial analytics," and Krishna has found that visualizing data is a great way of getting across the value of eSOA to busy executives. At TechEd, I watched a powerful demonstration of how a business could determine which neighborhoods were the best options for a new retail storefront, based on a "mashup" of population data, and income-by-neighborhood data.

During this demo, color codes made it easy to spot the other retail outlets in my company's chain of stores, as well as those of my competitors. It's this kind of visual power that brings mashups into the boardroom as a difference-maker in the process of analyzing the data that companies have worked so hard to pull from SAP into their BW and BI systems.

Another aspect of these mashups that gets the attention of executives is the ability to take advantage of best-of-breed content providers instead of having to invest in gathering that information internally. Krishna had a memorable take on this also: "If I need to fix a roof, there are two ways to do it: either I fix it by myself or I get the best guy to do it. The fact that now services are eSOA-enabled allows me as a company to delegate responsibility to people who can do best, without investing heavily in my internal infrastructure.

Going back to the market demographics example, I can build a very strong database of my prospects either by hiring twenty cold-callers who build my database or by going to ACNielson and using their capability and pre-built database of sales prospects. The power of eSOA now is the fact that I can go to ACNielson and embed the data into my ecosystem almost as seamlessly as though it is hiding inside my firewall. The fact that it's now best-of-breed as part of my ecosystem is really what eSOA is all about."

3. Mashups Do Not Require a Massive ERP Upgrade

One of the things that caught my ear was that Krishna's product does not require a company to be running on the latest version of SAP. For the most part, eSOA has been presented as the cherry on the sundae for those companies that have made the not-so-small investment in the NetWeaver 7.1/ERP 6.0 platform. But Krishna's product, and others like it, can run on any version of BW from 3.x onward that is built on some flavor of NetWeaver.

This is still beyond the reach of some SAP customers, but it's not nearly amount of pre-requisites that are needed to launch the typical eSOA initiative, or to use the SAP Enterprise Services Repository, which can only be accessed via NetWeaver 7.1. As long as you have some version of NetWeaver, and you have an instance of BW that is capable of expressing an MDX, which is short for Multi-Dimensional Expression Language, you can run products like Enterprise Horizon's Magma product.

Of course, there are other approaches to this "mashup" space besides Enterprise Horizons, and other products to consider. This article is not about a particular product - it's about a mindset shift in terms of how to approach eSOA within an enterprise. I talked to a major retail customer at TechEd who told me that they had found similar success using mashups from a different source than Krishna's. The logic, however, was the same: find a way to combine internal ERP data with best-of-breed content from third parties to analyze business trends in a whole new way.

There are plenty of companies that are looking to make an impression in this space. They seem to have one thing in common: help ERP customers take that hard-won ERP data and mix it with outside content that could not be easily assembled internally. WorkLight is another company that helps companies to take advantage of their ERP data and extend it to casual users via super-friendly "Web 2.0" interfaces.

During a podcast at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in 2007, David Lavenda, the Vice President of Marketing for WorkLight, explained how WorkLight goes beyond serving data to users. They also help companies to "mash" this data up with valuable third party content that would not have been easy to integrate previously. "We see a lot of interest today in application mashups," says Lavenda. "One example that we're showing: an investment bank manager who wants to correlate news that's happening out in the market with his customer portfolio.

News may be coming out about public companies - how does that affect his customers? So we have a mashup that mashes up corporate news and matches the company ticker symbol with the number of customers in the customer portfolio management application and also looks at the total amount of holdings. So with this mashup, the investment manager can see almost in real time the impact of news stories out in the market on what's happening with his customers, and which ones he needs to respond to."

Even though the potential for these mashups is powerful, Krishna is the first to point out that in the long run, if a company is serious about the eSOA platform, it will need to be running on the latest and greatest version of SAP and to invest in all the related governance and organizational structures needed to manage eSOA initiatives across the enterprise.

But what made an impression on me was the way in which this analytics-based SOA approach allows companies to build on the hard work they have already done populating their BW systems. And for those who want to prove the eSOA concept "one win at a time," this "eSOA with analytics" strategy seems to provide the opportunity to impress both project teams and higher level executives with the value of eSOA, without having to sell them on a massive ERP upgrade.

In the end, there's no getting around the development skills and organizational changes needed to tap into the promise of eSOA. We're too early on in the eSOA journey to know for sure how much of this technology is hype and how much is going to prove valuable. But one thing we do know: SAP customers are getting results from analytics-driven SOA mashups, and they are doing it affordably.

Site Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in a modified version in the December/January 2008 edition of SAPtips. SAPtips is a subscription-based publication, but you can obtain a free sample issue from the SAPtips web site, as well as information on all previously published articles.    

SAPtips Bio: Jon Reed, JonERP.com. Jon Reed is an independent SAP analyst who writes on SAP consulting trends. He is the President of JonERP.com, an interactive Web site which features Jon’s SAP Career Blog and his podcasts for SAP professionals. Jon has been publishing SAP career and market analysis for more than a decade, and he serves as the career expert for SearchSAP.com's "Ask the Expert" panel. From 2003 to 2006, Jon was the Managing Editor of SAPtips.

Jon Reed was recently named an SAP Mentor. The SAP Mentor Initiative is a highly selective program which recognizes those individuals who are making an outstanding contribution to the SAP community. Jon is one of 70 mentors who are playing an active role in SAP's online ecosystem, which includes the combined 1.3 million members of the SDN and BPX web sites.