There is often confusion about what ESA (now called enterprise SOA) actually means. The question of how to define and distinguish it from SOA has also been a topic at the ‘SOA Expertenrat‘ blog of Computerwoche. From my point of view the conceptual things discussed by SAP under the term enterprise SOA/ESA would be discussed by others using the term SOA (or enterprise SOA as well). So on this level there is not much difference. The difference is, that SAP as a solution provider is not only discussing the concepts but also offering elements to use in your own architecture (applications, business process templates and enterprise services), tools for creating new elements in your architecture (developer tools) and a foundation for running your architecture implementation (infrastructure).

So here is my defnition:

Enterprise SOA (in the way the term is used by SAP) is a reference architecture for service-based, enterprise-scale business solutions and SAP’s recommendation for establishing a service-oriented architecture.

The focus is on enterprise services used in prechoreographed, easily adaptable business processes and provided by an application platform, as well as on the technology platform SAP NetWeaver, which is offering the supporting infrastructure, frameworks and tools.

Enterprise Services are robust, coarse-grained Web services designed at SAP using enterprise-wide harmonized business objects and global data types. The creation of such services is surveyed by a governance process to ensure reuse and high business relevance.

This defnition might change over time. I am looking forward to receive comments on whether you like the definition or whether you would change something. Of course you can also provide your own definition.

Categories: SAP enterprise SOA