News Review: Does SOA spell the end of SAP
Is this the end of the SAP Consultant's gravy train?.
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SAP Consultants have always had an interesting life.
The challenge centres around the fact that you cannot ever have a generic solution to a specific set of customer requirements. It is all very well persuading people in the Infrastructure world that a generic solution like Tivoli or Unicenter or Patrol will address their needs. Crudely speaking, Infrastructure is Infrastructure. But when you get into Enterprise Resource Planning you are touching key differentiators. Each company's balance sheet and profit and loss accounting is different. Touch that, and you must have a specific solution tailored to each customer.
So what does this have to do with SOA? Everything.
In the past, this customization has been done by highly skilled (and highly paid) consultants who would crawl all over the organization and require significant amounts business analysis before they could work their magic in customizing SAP. As a result, deployments of SAP could sometimes be measured in years and months, rather than the months and days which other applications may have required.
I am not suggesting that there was anything wrong with this. It was simply a by-product of having to customize each deployment of SAP to address the specific business needs of the customer. But now things may begin to change.
SOA - the next generation
But re-writing SAP to conform to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) could potentially (and I use the work "potentially" deliberately) solve this challenge and reduce the time to deployment of SAP solutions. It might also reduce the complexity and deployment challenges, so that SAP could deploy upgrades and enhancements quicker.
The SAP approach employs NetWeaver and Web Services, so that all SAP software will be SOA-enabled by 2007
This should be good news for Systems Integrators or Customers. In theory, with a common services interface, it should be easier to customize SAP, and/or integrate it with other Office or Enterprise software products. After all, there are many developers these days that know about Web Services. The recent announcement of SPA Discovery will also help smooth this transition.
SAP could become part of a so-called "composite application" containing Business and Financial workflows. According to one Research Group, SAP's decision to use a model-based approach will make it easier to tailor the application to fit the business, not vice-versa.
In short, SAP's pragmatic approach may reduce time to deployment and thereby increase the attractiveness of SAP to small and medium size businesses. To do this, SAP may well have to look at it's pricing model.
SOA Footnote
On a general note, there is also some disillusionment arising about the use of SOA these days. Even David Chappell is quoted as saying that software re-use (one of the key justifications for introducing a SOA) has failed because of the cultural and business barriers.
So, for many organizations like SAP, the key benefit of SOA-enabling their software may be to open it up to the customers. This may mean that the age of the specialized SAP customization consultant may be numbered.
On the other hand, I seem to remember them saying a similar thing when COBOL was introduced...
Reviewed by Dennis Adams in September 2006
