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What Sharp Did
Sharp identified an opportunity to use portal and process integration technology from SAP's NetWeaver to enable an automated credit card process for customer and employee orders, reducing the amount of time spent manually entering and authorizing purchases. The integration of Sharp technology with services from credit-card payment gateway PayPal and credit-card clearing house First Data through SAP's NetWeaver resulted in improved customer satisfaction, efficiencies in ordering processes and a reduction in delayed or missed payments.
According to the SAP spokeswoman, Sharp did not use an industry specific package from SAP, nor did an industry specific package result from the company's work. What Sharp achieved could be applied to multiple industries.
SAP's SOA roadmap outlines enhancements in the company's NetWeaver integrated technology platform, which provides the development and runtime environment for SAP applications and can be used for custom development and integration with other applications and systems.
As part of its SOA roadmap, SAP brought out a version of NetWeaver Enterprise Services Repository (SAP NetWeaver ESR) that provides access to more than 1,000 enterprise services. NetWeaver ESR comes with business process models and business object models, in addition to Web service definitions. Using the system, customers and business partners can ensure common business semantics for ease of composition and reuse, SAP says.
The company also released SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment. This product is an integrated set of tools that customers, partners and SAP itself can use for the composition and deployment of standards-based composite applications.
Industry analysts say SAP is trying to leverage its position in the enterprise application market to advance its SOA technology. Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of consulting and research firm Hurwitz & Associates, says SAP, like other SOA vendors, is trying to be a one-stop shop for SOA technology.
SAP "is looking at packaged software as the control point for SOA," Hurwitz says. She says the company's selling point is that its products are all standards based, rather than a hodgepodge of products from multiple acquisitions.
SAP's SOA products are centered on its enterprise applications and are not generally sold as standalone SOA software, says Ian Finley, research director at AMR Research. "SAP's focus is enabling its customers to create new applications and integrate business processes both inside and outside their companies by leveraging SOA and their investment in SAP applications," he says.
SAP NetWeaver provides much of the capability found in competing SOA software products and has the added advantage of SAP-supported integration with current and future SAP applications, Finley says.
"SAP continues to invest heavily in NetWeaver and its integration with SAP applications in order to make it more attractive as a strategic SOA platform," he says. "SAP's current SOA software, its track record of delivering against commitments and the strategic position SAP applications enjoy in many of its customers makes it likely that many of [these] 43,000-plus customers will choose SAP as their SOA platform vendor."
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