30 Minute Interview

“The concept of Web services has to move to the business level.”

Atul Sareen, Director Operations, SAP India Pvt. Ltd discusses about enterprise services, a concept that goes a step beyond Web services and the company’s plans in this regard, with Prashant L Rao.

Atul Sareen

Everybody’s talking about Web Services, What’s next on this front?

SAP has enterprise service architecture (ESA) and enterprise services repository (ESR) both of which build upon the concept of Web services. A Web service request is handled by the repository—it knows what needs to be done and triggers off a combination of Web Services to complete a process. NetWeaver uses ESR.

The enterprise services stored in the repository can include home-grown services, SAP’s own services as well as services created by our business partners. We provide tools and components to build enterprise services.

A set of enterprise services is bundled with the platform and additional services are provided by our partners. All these services go into the ESR. Wipro, TCS, and other ISVs can create enterprise services for a customer and use NetWeaver to deliver them.

An enterprise service is created by taking a component of a business process and exporting it as a Web service. The difference between a Web service and an enterprise service is that the latter offers a higher level of abstraction.

In an enterprise service a set of Web services is choreographed to deliver a result. We have identified many enterprise services and put them into the ESR.

Simply put, an enterprise services is to a business process what a Web service is to an IT process.

It is all based on open standards. To give another example, you can take an ERP, CRM or supply chain process and map that to a Web service. Then you take several Web services and combine them into an enterprise service.

How long would it take for a company to adopt ESA?

ESA is a journey that takes about six to eight months to complete. To begin with we conduct ESA adoption workshops for a day or two where we explain SOA and other related concepts to the client. Next, the ESA roadmap is defined.

To name a few of our Indian clients, Asian Paints, BPCL and M&M are actively using our platform to develop xApps and using ESA.

What’s the difference between enterprise services and xApps?

xApps are composite applications. Some of these are built by SAP, some by our partners. For instance, there is an xApp called Resource & Program Management (xRPM) that consolidates information from financial systems running on SAP or Oracle and HR information across applications. It also consolidates project management information from SAP and Microsoft Project to provide a dashboard for either a consultant, resource manager, project manager or a CEO.

Information is culled from all these applications using middleware. It is a bi-directional mechanism that goes beyond viewing data. Pharmaceutical R&D teams use this application in Europe and South Asia. Similarly there is an xApp called xMMI for process based manufacturing.

Newgen’s document management solution runs on SAP and it uses SAP’s application server to run the applications. Customers can run these applications on their existing SAP infrastructure.

PoS terminals running xApps on SAP application server are pre-integrated into SAP retail. Our partners selling these PoS terminals can say on the box that the terminal is powered by NetWeaver.

Most software companies are gung-ho about building a developer community. Is SAP following suit?

We have almost a million members (200,000 to 2,50,000 Indians) on the SAP software developer network that has been around for about two years. Recently we started a community of business process experts who devise enterprise services. This portal was launched on September 12th 2006. [Editor’s Note: The business process expert community can be found at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/bpx]

Do you expect Web services adoption to pick up soon?

As long as Web services remain at the technology level, adoption will be slow. The concept has to move to the business level.