CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

18 May 2005

Product News

Technology Titans Align Around Enterprise Services Architecture From SAP to Provide 'Enterprise Services-Ready' Solutions

SAP AG 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.

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 NetWeaverT, 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 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 integrate SAP® Business One capabilities as part of its next-generation network in order to simplify software and hardware deployment.

"Customers in large enterprises as well as small and midsize businesses will be able to take advantage of real-time business event visibility, increased application security, business process innovation, and transactional integrity as a result of the tight integration between the Cisco applications aware network and ESA," said Taf Anthias, general manager and vice president for the AON Business Unit at Cisco.

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® xAppsT packaged composite applications.

"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."

EMC Corporation

At SAPPHIRE Boston, EMC Corporation and SAP announced expansion of their alliance to help companies deploy a successful information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. EMC and SAP will deliver a portfolio of service offerings, branded as "Enterprise Services-Ready," that will help SAP customers better manage corporate-wide information at minimal operational risk and maximum business benefit.

"With ESA, SAP is building a pluggable architecture that will enable more seamless integration between SAP's application environment and EMC's ILM infrastructure capabilities," said Howard Elias, EMC's executive vice president of Corporate Marketing and Office of Technology. "This expanded alliance will translate into increased value for our thousands of customers, providing them with increased flexibility and reduced time to deployment while lowering overall management 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.

"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 XeonT to CentrinoT mobile technology."

Macromedia

Also detailed at SAPPHIRE Copenhagen, SAP is using the Macromedia Flex framework to give organizations the ability to create rich, effective user interfaces for SAP NetWeaver solutions (see April 26, 2005 press release titled, "SAP and Macromedia Advance Usability of Enterprise Software"). Leveraging ESA, Macromedia Flex can help increase adoption and usage of SAP solutions by making data more accessible, understandable and useful to end users.

"Enterprise services bring a new level of agility for accessing enterprise data," said David Mendels, general manager, Macromedia. "Macromedia and SAP are working together to radically improve the user experience by combining the intuitive, productive interfaces of Macromedia Flex with the flexibility and perennial nature of Enterprise services."

Mercury

Mercury is partnering with SAP to deliver quality, performance and management solutions for ESA deployments. Specifically, Mercury's Business Technology Optimization solutions will help to standardize the quality process of enterprise services to reduce application deployment risk and enable a stable migration of customized business processes.

"Mercury is pleased to work with SAP to help our joint customers successfully deliver and manage their ESA initiatives," said Zohar Gilad, senior vice president of strategy at Mercury. "As Web services and SOA momentum increases, Mercury is committed to providing best practices, software and services to help SAP customers optimize the value of their Web services and component business applications."

Microsoft

Announced at SAPPHIRE '05 Copenhagen, SAP and Microsoft are jointly developing a new product on BPP, code-named "Mendocino," that will help companies gain a competitive advantage by revolutionizing the way information workers access, analyze and use enterprise data and business processes to make better business decisions (see April 26, 2005 press release titled, "SAP and Microsoft Announce First Joint Product Designed to Revolutionize How Information Workers Access Enterprise Applications"). "Mendocino" will leverage enterprise services to link selected SAP process functionality directly to the Microsoft® Office applications that hundreds of millions of people use every day. The solution will leverage the full capabilities of Enterprise Services Architecture and SAP NetWeaver, Microsoft .NET, The Microsoft Office System and Microsoft SQL Server.

"'Mendocino' builds on our commitment to Web services as the foundation for the next generation of enterprise software," said Lewis Levin, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office Business Applications. " 'Mendocino' takes advantage of the openness of Enterprise Services Architecture and the Web services power of Microsoft .NET to seamlessly deliver business information and business processes to the Microsoft Office environment, used by millions of information workers every day."

Symantec

Symantec is discussing development opportunities with SAP to provide intelligent, application-specific security capabilities that support business processes across the enterprise. Offering Symantec's threat protection and policy compliance technologies with ESA will help ensure the security and availability of SAP applications within the enterprise application environment.

"Symantec is committed to providing its customers with solutions that secure enterprise applications in diverse environments," said Niall Wall, vice president, Business Development and Alliances at Symantec. "Symantec will work with SAP to identify opportunities to deliver intelligent, application- specific security and availability solutions for our mutual customers."

VERITAS

VERITAS will leverage ESA to provide application availability solutions for SAP customers. VERITAS offers high-availability software to protect SAP applications and data from hardware and software failures and to enable customers to upgrade SAP deployments without taking systems offline. Customers leveraging ESA can use VERITAS solutions to move entire SAP applications across systems or server clusters to help ensure continuous processing and optimal workload management. VERITAS plans to work with SAP to give customers enterprise-wide visibility and control of server and storage utilization, performance and costs so that customers implementing ESA can more easily align IT with business requirements.

"VERITAS supports SAP solutions today and is also working to enable Enterprise Services Architecture," said Sanjay Poonen, vice president, Strategic Alliances, VERITAS Software. "Through VERITAS software products for high availability, our mutual customers benefit from reduced application downtime and simplified systems management through increased automation. In addition, VERITAS software for data protection and performance management help enable SAP customers to aid business continuity and optimize ERP application performance to meet changing business requirements."

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