Introduction
I got a lot of questions from SAP customers during the last few months about enterprise SOA, SAP’s vision and strategy but in this Weblog I would like to provide an answer to one common question that was asked by most of the customers and this is : ` What is the difference between “ESA Adoption program” and “ESA Roadmap” ?, Now, when “SAP Discovery System for enterprise SOA ” released , some people asking me how it is related two previous definitions. Nevertheless the fact that all these programs/systems/services are quite different they have a lot in common (except for having ESA / enterprise SOA in their name:) ). I hope that the whole picture will become much clearer after reading this blog.
What are “ESA Adoption Program” ,“ESA roadmap” and “SAP Discovery System for enterprise SOA” ?
As you can understand from ESA Adoption Program name is a Program providing a consistent,sequenced, and incremental set of services and associated content, tools,templates and samples to be leveraged by SAP, partners, and our customers. This facilitates the successful adoption and implementation of SAP NetWeaver as a foundation for an enterprise Services Oriented Architecture.
This program was created by SAP (NetWeaver Advisory Office, Consulting and Marketing) to make enterprise SOA a reality for customers. It offers a common set of services and support resources along with a series of logical steps and milestones (Discovery, Evaluation , Implementation and Operations) to guide customers towards a flexible and cost-efficient Enterprise Services Architecture.
An ESA Roadmap is a service developed by Consulting. It is a first scenario that shows how enterprise SOA can improve and optimize existing business processes. It is a core service of the evaluation phase of ESA Adoption Program, during which an ESA roadmap is adapted to the customer's specific needs. Once a company has successfully created a roadmap, it defines a short-, mid-, and long-term action plan that covers areas of the business process, technology, application landscape, enterprise services, and change management needs. ESA roadmaps are prepared for the customers basing on their business and IT landscape, architecture, strategy, pain points, priorities facing the business, etc
SAP Discovery System for enterprise SOA is a system/solution developed by Service Solution Management, Solution Office and Best Practices Team. The SAP Discovery System provides a preconfigured, preinstalled mySAP ERP and NetWeaver environment to jumpstart the enterprise SOA learning experience. Includes mySAP ERP (ECC 5.0), NetWeaver, a sample composite application with all of the documentation to run the demo and even deploy the scenario in your own landscape if you wanted to. The SAP Discovery System for enterprise SOA is a complete landscape for E-SOA learning and exploration and perfect first step on the road to E-SOA adoption.
Possible usages of SAP Discovery System for enterprise SOA in the Adoption Program and ESA Roadmap (please note that this is my own point of view but not an official SAP Statement):
Discovery
Evaluation
Implementation
Operations
- Demo
- Learning
- Proof of Concept
- Evaluate scenarios
- Learning
- Prototyping
- Test
- Development of the scenarios/composite apps/xApps
- Deploy
Summary
As you can see from the description above ESA Roadmap is part of the Adoption program,you can think of ESA Adoption Program as a collection of workshops and services which guides the customers/partners through the different lifecycle phases when ESA Roadmap is one of these services (ESA Roadmap usually consist of a number of workshops to understand the business needs, pain points….). ESA Roadmap is part of ESA Adoption Program. Customers / partners can use SAP Discovery System for enterprise SOA during different phases of ESA Adoption Program and it is perfect system (or a tool in terms of ESA Adoption Program) to show the real value of enterprise SOA , do proof of concept and testing. So if we are talking in terms of ESA Adoption Program ,SAP Discovery System for enterprise SOA is a tool for ESA Adoption Program
