SOA with Process Integration (PI) 7.1/7.3

SOA is a Service Oriented Architecture that facilitates you to expose business functionalities as executable services. In today’s IT scenario, companies are adapting new business process or modifying existing business process based on their requirements, but at the same time organizations want cost effective solution to do so.

A telephone service provider TSP, for instance, is adapting or changing new business process to facilitate you to top-up your mobiles. Previously you used to go to operator’s office for topping up your prepaid mobile card, but nowadays you don’t do that. You can top-up your card using online portal, sending SMS, calling to customer care, or swiping a dedicated card on any vendor’s machine. In future you may see other alternatives also.

    Figure 1: Service Operator and users

But what is most common in this diagram? Simple, you are calling/reusing a “service” called ApplyCredit, for instance, for applying credit on your phone. ApplyCredit, which is modeled and developed in SAP PI and which is integrated with legacy systems, is resued in diffrent business use cases. 

  Figure 2: Service Architecture and Service Abstraction

The service is analyzed, designed, implemented, tested, and deployed using proper SOA governance. By understanding business functionality and applying proper SOA governance, you can create enterprise service that can be reusable in different business processes and projects. Isn’t save your IT cost?

In SOA you expose business functionalities in the form of services so that you can use them at enterprise level. You can use services where ever you want and as many times you need. Using SOA middleware, SAP PI 7.1/7.3, you create services for business logic and wrap existing legacy functionality to expose them as service. But to do so you have to follow proper service governance, apply SOA Design Principles, use best pratices of implementation and so on.

In upcoming blogs I’ll cover following concepts of SOA:

1. Service Governance using SAP 7.3 and its WEB GUI
2. Service Design Principles such as Service Contract, Service Abstraction, Service Reusability, Service Coupling, Service Composability etc.
3. Key features and benefits of SAP PI 7.3 or PI 7.1 in SOA landscape