How to Understand Why SAP Will Never Support SOA - Brightwork Research & Analysis

Table of Contents: Select a Link to be Taken to That Section

Executive Summary

What is SOA, and why SAP put out misleading information about SOA?
SAP’s inaccurate books on SOA.

SAP has some fairy dust they would like to sell you…. it called SOA.

What Is SOA?

SOA stands for service-oriented architecture. A service-oriented architecture is a software development model that is the complete opposite of the entire SAP development model. Under the SAP development model, most of the SAP products are written in ABAP. Secondly, the applications are only designed to inter-operate with other SAP applications, and they do so through interfaces that have specific mappings contained within them.

Of all applications I have worked with, SAP is the most difficult to move data into or out of because SAP does not allow direct access to its tables. And also, because it does not provide or accept table exports (i.e., rows and columns of data), but instead uses hierarchical intermediate documents which require error-prone scripting mapping and extraction, or BAPIs – Business Application Programming Interfaces.

Why SAP Pushes Companies to Overestimate the Cost and Complexity of Integration

The difficulty in integration has been used to strategic advantage by SAP. They have promoted the concept that since integration is so difficult, it’s simply better to buy 100% SAP products. This has been SAP’s strategy for decades, so it would be strange if they changed it.

I would be shocked if SAP ever, in fact, supported SOA because if SOA ever became the norm for software, SAP would cease to be the dominant vendor that it is. The primary thing that keeps SAP’s lagging edge software on top is a giant wall of a lack of interoperability around SAP and its tie-in with the major consulting firms that seek to push their customers to choose the highest TCO applications.

Once components could be mixed and matched, and the best functionality could be selected, SAP would fall right over.

Why Is SAP Putting Out Misleading Information About SOA?

Several years ago, discussions around SOA became popular, and SAP thought it would like to co-opt the concept. So they decided to declare that “NetWeaver” (a product and platform which does not exist and is merely a repackaging of relatively unrelated and disintegrated SAP products) is SOA. It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly untrue this is. SAP software is so far away from the concept of service-oriented architecture that it is a sad commentary on the integrity of the information systems media. This concept has not yet been written about as false. Amazingly, there has even been a book published on this topic.

False Books on SOA and SAP

The book Mastering Enterprise SAO with SAP NetWeaver is a curious combination of false words and concepts. So SOA is not possible within SAP due to its fundamental design. SAP NetWeaver does not exist, and mySAP ERP was a bit of a renaming of ERP that was done to ride the trend a few years ago of naming things “my**” but was nothing different from simply SAP ERP.

SAP Labs Paper on ERP and SOA

“Some mature information technologies, such as ERP systems and relational databases, are now undergoing commoditization, much like what happened in the automotive and chemical industries over the past 15 years. This trend is accelerating by reducing IT spending because of slowing economic growth.

I see big technology and business model changes coming from ERP. New technology trends such as high-performance computing, pervasive connectivity, Web services, and SOA will affect the front end as well as the back end of ERP.

….an ERP’s average life cycle is about 15 years.”

This is a study from SAP Labs. Interestingly none of these things happened in the roughly nine years since this was published. SOA and web services went nowhere. High-performance computing has did not affect ERP.

SOA lets developers partition and decouple applications. It provides a bridge between incompatible technologies.

No one did more to undermine SOA than SAP. SAP is based upon coupling applications and restricting competition. Why would they want to decouple applications?

Web services are ideal for letting developers adapt ERP to fast-changing business processes. Web services can be orchestrated to create multi-service business processes that connect via SOA to the robust and reliable back end….

Once again, no one did more to undermine this than SAP. SAP does not want flexibility or open systems. But people who work for SAP Labs are not going to put this in a paper.

Real SOA

There are very few actual service-oriented architecture vendors in the marketplace. Most vendors are using the terminology but without actually adjusting their software. One vendor who does practice SOA is called High Jump. They meet the definition of service-oriented architecture because their software is component-based. Any component can be called from within High Jump or by another application outside of High Jump.

This definition can be applied to any vendor to differentiate real SOA vendors from fake ones like SAP.

Go to top

Conclusion

SAP’s commitment to SOA is fake and is just an attempt to appear trendy and co-opt a popular concept. SOA is precisely the opposite of SAP’s business model.

References

ERP is Deal, Long Live ERP. SAP Labs, Published by the IEEE Computer Society, Paul Hoffman. 2008.