During the TechEds in 2007 we conducted a couple of Use-Case Identification sessions with a wide range of customers and partner to identify the pressing challenges they face while integrating SOA infrastructure from several vendors.
The discussions and priorization led to the following list of focus topics:
To look into these topics in greater detail we formed a Community Advisory Group with the charter to "Enable customers to embrace enterprise SOA while honoring their existing SOA investments and create a mutual understanding of Partners and SAPs approach to SOA" with the following member companies:
During the first half of the year we had face-to-face meetings with the group in Walldorf, Palo Alto and Bangalore and regular online conferences in between. The meetings where geared towards getting feedback on latest developments from SAP (SOA Middleware Roadmap, SCA, SOA Testing etc.) and learning about the scenarios that Customers and Partners see in their usage of SOA.As results of the discussion we build up a Heterogeneous SOA Reference Landscape in the Co-Innovation Lab to prove the integration of certain components of a Heterogeneous SOA Landscape.
More details can be found in the blog How to deal with heterogeneous eSOA Landscapes that will also link to the results of the ESB co-existence project that should be available early next year.
For the Registry integration we worked closely with HP as the first partner and created two documents that outline the integration of HP's registry with the SAP Services Registry as well as the usage of HP's registry tooling from within the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio.
The overall topic as well as the sub-project for ESB co-existence run by Peter Kulka where presented during the TechEds. The session Applying Enterprise SOA in Heterogeneous SOA Landscape is available as recording.
Based on a Survey with the Advisory Group we also created a more comprehensive survey on Heterogeneous SOA that was open for participation to all active ESC and SDN members.
Highlights from the results include:
- 55% of the participants are already beyond the explore phase in their SOA adoption.
- Non-SAP services in ESR is an important topic.
- Almost 2/3 of the participants see ESR as their primary repository. However for less then 1/3 the same is true for the registry.
- SAP NetWeaver PI will be the primary ESB for more than 50% of the participants
- There is a strong interest in SCA.
- 52% of the participants are planing to use SAPs methodology for service design.
We will continue to work on additional projects in the realm during 2009 to get further results on ESB co-existence, End-to-End Monitoring and SOA Governance. Eventually there will be a second phase of the Advisory Group to cover latest developments in the industrie as well as in the SAP produce portfolio. So stay tuned.
I'd like to thank all Participants for their great contributions as well as Jochen Vatter from the ESC Team for supporting this Advisory Group.
