The SAP Proposition (Efficienc y, Flexibility, and Insight in Business Networks)

SAP software is renowned for helping companies achieve the key strategic aspects of a best-run business. With SAP Business Suite applications and SAP BusinessObjects solutions, SAP is applying that leadership in business software to meet new demands and enabling companies to leverage existing SAP ERP applications. 

SAP has long been a leader in the enterprise applications market, helping organizations automate and improve business operations, leading to better business process execution. With the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio of solutions, SAP has enhanced its offering and also provides leading business intelligence software to help  organizations make better strategic decisions. The combined portfolios of solutions give customers superior execution and strategy and, most important, provide the means to align and connect them in a closed-loop system supporting strategic and operational agility. SAP software supports greater efficiency within the company and across the business network, sharpens insight for users based on reliable real-time data, and provides the flexibility to turn insight into strategic decisions. This results in optimized business performance, which enterprises need to stay ahead of the competition. 

By providing a comprehensive portfolio of modular applications, SAP addresses the business needs of enterprises of all sizes in all industries, helping optimize business operations and IT with respect to process flexibility, efficiency, and insight into business networks. Based on open, service-enabled business process and intelligence platforms, SAP software drives end-toend, industry-specific processes and increases insight for all lines of business. In times of limited IT budgets, SAP software helps companies control TCO by providing support for integrated processes and harmonized user interfaces that minimize the need for user training. SAP solutions contribute to simplified software landscapes that greatly reduce integration efforts, help improve a company’s business process management capabilities, and allow process and technology innovation to be activated selectively. 

With SAP software, companies can balance traditional IT transactions and cutting-edge business technology interactions. With the software, businesses can mediate the differences of business technology and information technology – connecting (yet creating a buffer between) the front office and back office and providing the necessary security of data and processes.

SAP Business Suite – Execute on Business and IT Strategies

SAP Business Suite helps enterprises optimize, execute, and align business and IT strategies. With the software, companies have the unique ability to perform essential end-to-end business processes with modular applications that are designed to work with each other. In addition to reporting and analytics functions, companies get a robust technology environment for designing, composing, and adapting business processes that meet specific industry needs, from healthcare to consumer products manufacturing. SAP Business Suite applications support processes for finance, human resources, manufacturing, procurement, product development, marketing, sales, service, supply chain management, and IT management.

Enabled by SOA , SAP Business Suite gives large enterprises the flexibility to adjust business processes in a world of accelerating change. The core applications1 of SAP Business Suite are powered by the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform, enabling companies to integrate value chains and leverage SAP and non-SAP solutions from the SAP ecosystem. The platform enables organizations to support the integrity, security, and scalability of missioncritical business processes.

With SAP Business Suite, every line of business can receive transactional information and management reports – anytime from anywhere – through standard SAP interfaces, mobile devices, and desktop applications. The software helps companies connect operations with strategy for planning, budgeting, and operational reporting across organizational divisions and processes.

With the latest releases of SAP Business Suite applications, powerful functionality helps companies address the new challenges of business technology and information technology. The latest versions enable valuable, comprehensive sets of interconnected business processes that support the company’s business strategy and involve multiple lines of business. Preintegrated processes support lines of business in optimizing key performance indicators that contribute to enterprise business strategies. Examples of these value scenarios include:

• Collaborative demand and supply planning and manufacturing network planning for consumer products companies

• Integrated product development for high-tech companies

• Asset safety and compliance for chemical companies

To Know more About SAP :

SAP Overview 

SAP Business Suite 

I would Invite All SAP professionals to highlight more on this technology & share their views.

I would be more than happy to read your comments.

Cheers,

Hakim Jamali

Web Services Business Strategies

What Are Web Services?
Not too long ago, a few XML-based standards for passing information over the Internet
were brought together and began to be touted as the Next Big Thing. In a way, they are,
although Web Services have undoubtedly received more than their fair share of hype. So,
what's all the fuss about? The basic premise behind Web Services is that a piece of code is
made available to remote machines, using specific protocols, over the Internet. The Service
part of Web Services relates to the idea of providing access to functionality without having
to download or install the code, and the Web part refers to the means through which the
functionality is accessed.
The three component standards of Web Services are the Simple Object Access Protocol
(SOAP), Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), and Web Services
Description Language (WSDL.)

SOAP provides the first piece of the puzzle: a means for one piece of code to communicate
with another piece of code. The important thing about SOAP is that it enables communication
across all languages (from Java to Visual Basic, say), and doesn't come in different versions for
connecting different pairs of languages. The same SOAP message should work as well
between Java and Visual Basic as it does between C++ and Perl. This language independence
means that a Web Service implemented in one language can be accessed by several languages
through one interface.
UDDI describes a registry in which Web Services can be advertised. The initial idea was that
the details of a required Web Service would be discovered dynamically, shortly before it was
to be used. Although technically possible, this remains an unlikely situation for a number of
reasons, including the speed of the discovery process, the need for trust, and the quality of the
data in the UDDI registry. What is more likely to happen is that a potential subscriber to a
Web Service would find details of interesting Web Services in the UDDI registry, and then
contact the providers of those services in a more conventional way before attempting to use
any service. Once a relationship has been established between the subscriber and the
provider, business would continue as normal.
WSDL is the XML-based format in which a publisher describes their Web Service. An entry
in a UDDI registry would point to a WSDL file, which would supply important details about
the service. These details would include the name of the service, any parameters that must be
passed to it, and what form the response will take.
(More about WSDL can be found from HERE )

Do They Mean Business?
So much for the technology behind Web Services, but what is the business perspective? Web
Services can be pictured as a relationship between a service provider and a service consumer,
or publisher and subscriber. The service provided can be either functionality (all manner of
calculations), or data access (providing a regulated view of any repository of data). The
provider and consumer could well be within the same company, since Web Services
potentially enable a rapid application development solution to integration problems.
Alternatively, Web Services could be used to integrate systems between trusted partner
companies.
Web Services are a way to drive down costs by reducing data and functionality duplication
within an organization. Rather than having three departments running three different
packages to do the same job because they're all using different systems, the functionality can
be centralized and accessed as Web Services, regardless of the platform each department uses
for its own needs. Web Services are also a way to drive up income, by allowing an
organization to market their previously purely internal functionality to a wider audience. If
part of your system does a good job of providing a certain type of valuable information in a
timely manner, it could be a candidate for exposure as a Web Service so that it can be
marketed as a service to other companies.


Why Web Services Are Important


As we've seen, Web Services are many things to different people, and because of these varied
applications they are important in several ways. There are three areas in which Web Services
can become important to an organization, as follows:
❑ Financial Imperatives.
❑ Strategic Imperatives.
❑ Structural Imperatives.

Financial Imperatives:
The importance of money is something that is not lost on most people, although we all wish we
had more to spare. Web Services have the potential to free up money within an organization, by
driving down integration costs, reducing expensive functionality duplication, and providing new
revenue streams from existing functionality or data. At least, that's what people say, but how
accurate is this rosy picture of Web Services, and how far away is its realization?
As with all new technologies, people make bold claims about Web Services in an effort to get
them adopted more quickly. The hope is that reality will be brought into line with the vision,
so that the vision is proved right. This means that for the early adopters of Web Services the
results may not be as dramatic as the vision would claim. As implementations of the
technology catch up with the vision, so will the cost reductions. Even so, Web Services are
being adopted by large organizations, such as French institutional and corporate bank CDC
(Caisse des Depots et Consignations, http://www.caissedesdepots.fr/). According to an article
on Line56.com (http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=3702), CDC are an
advanced client of Mercator (http://www.mercator.com/) for integration using Web Services.
The reasons behind the need for integration are common amongst growing organizations,
namely several business units using different systems.
Web Services are also being adopted to provide new revenue. Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance
(http://www.ltsbcf.co.uk/) have exposed their credit rating facilities as Web Services, another
move reported by Line56.com (http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?NewsID=3360).
This Web Service, which replaces the old manually requested version, is largely made possible
through use of Microsoft's BizTalk Server. As well as improving the number of requests they can
handle (only exceptions are dealt with manually), the service is a product in its own right, and is
frequently used by other divisions of the company.


Strategic Imperatives:
As well as improving the financial position of an organization by reducing costs and
increasing revenue, Web Services can have a beneficial impact on strategy. Web Services
could provide smaller organizations with an affordable means to access functionality or data
in a form more readily useable by their internal systems. This means that, as the costs
involved would be less than those of attempting to acquire the same functionality using
proprietary means, it is more reasonable for an organization to incorporate the functionality
into its own systems. The reduction in costs, both financial and time, allows the company to
focus on other issues.
On the other side of the coin, organizations publishing Web Services have an increased range
of services they can sell, to an increased range of potential customers. By exposing the
information in a standard manner, there is no restriction on the customer to use a particular
system, allowing the publisher to sell to smaller organizations. As well as being able to sell
more functionality to more people, Web Services provides a cheaper and more efficient
distribution channel, increasing the attractiveness of the proposition.

Finally, because Web Services make it easier to subscribe to functionality provided by
external agencies, outsourcing that functionality and data management to expert companies
becomes much more viable for the smaller business. Having externally provided functionality
and data management further allows the organization to focus on strategy.


Structural Imperatives:
Hand in hand with reshaping strategy is realigning structure, and the adoption of Web
Services may increase the desirability – if not the necessity – of restructuring. For example, if
we consolidate financial reporting to a head-office-based Web Service, this may well imply the
need for a reorganization of the company's finance departments. Since this restructuring could
mean a reduction in staff, the system would become more efficient by giving the same results
with fewer resources. This streamlining of departments, by centralizing functionality without
reducing its accessibility, means that an organization can become leaner and more flexible
through increased access to functionality and data.
Using Web Services to provide functionality from a central location would also allow work to
become less location-dependent. If the principal functionality a worker depends on to do their
job is accessible over the Internet, then the work can be carried out wherever the Internet can
be accessed from (almost anywhere, these days). Equally, it means that the work can be
consolidated into fewer locations, further streamlining the organization.





Links to know more about Web Services:
Web Service Architecture
Implementing J2EE Webservice

I've got 2 quick questions for you…

1.      What are the current challenges in your organization that you want Web Services to solve?

2.      What are the current issues you have been facing while implementing Web Services ?

I would be more than happy to share my knowledge & read your comments.

Cheers,

Hakim Jamali

How will you interact with your gadgets after 5years?

Hi,

I came across something very interesting & thought would like to share with you all. Please follow the link below & find out how techy idiots can really be.
This guy is really rocking man...
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/

Do share your views on the same.

Would like to hear from you all.

Cheers.

Hakim Jamali

What is BPEL and why is it so important to my business?

Introduction

BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language, and comes from a standards consortium consisting of BEA Systems, IBM, and Microsoft, BPEL combines and replaces IBM's WebServices Flow Language (WSFL) and Microsoft's XLANG specification. BPEL provides an �orchestration engine� for describing exchanges of information internally or externally. BPEL deals explicitly with the functional aspects of business processes: control flow (branch, loop, parallel), asynchronous conversations and correlation, long running nested units of work, faults and compensation. BPEL directly addresses these business process challenges: coordinating asynchronous communication between services, correlating message exchanges between parties, implementing parallel processing of activities, manipulating data between partner interactions, supporting long running business transactions and activities, and providing consistent exception handling.
In Power to The BPEL: A Technology for Web Services, David Petersen wrote "Web services technology is rapidly evolving to meet the complex needs of the enterprise customer. The ability to integrate and assemble individual Web services into standards-based business processes is an important element of the service-oriented enterprise and the overall Web service technology stack." BPEL is that technology that integrates and assembles the Web Services.
Many organizations are asking "Why is BPEL important for my business?"
Today's burgeoning world of Web services is clearly the next "great thing" in the field of e-commerce and integration, but until there is a common standard on how to publish multiple services orchestrate them into business processes and audit and manage the results, Web services is a �great technology� without a way for business to use it. For businesses, having access to Web service-enabled applications connected via BPEL means significant increases in efficiency and effectiveness. BPEL is an excellent way of implementing trading partner integration using the Internet. BPEL provides the ability for a company to quickly adapt or create new business processes, both internally and to its trading partner community. "Workflow is about the structure of interaction between various participants, with dependencies among tasks, and the rules and the routes between them, and all the conditions for when tasks are initiated and advanced to the next step or rolled back," said James Kobielus, senior analyst at the Burton Group. "Traditionally, this has been a human workflow, but in the Web services context it now relates to application-to-application interaction. That's where orchestration comes in." BPEL enables that orchestration of tasks in web based services.
BPEL is a XML-based workflow definition language that allows businesses to describe inter or intra enterprise business processes that are connected via Web services. BPEL becomes the �glue� to bind Web services into a cohesive business solution, facilitating their orchestrated interaction both within and between enterprises. A Business Process using BPEL can compose multiple Web services, effectively creating a completely new business application with its own public interface to end users (internal or external). BPEL opens a completely new way or at least enhanced way, for software development for mainstream business applications to allow a programmer to describe a business process that will take place across the Internet. BPEL provides an XML-based grammar for describing the logic to control and coordinate Web services participating in a process flow. This grammar can be interpreted and executed by a BPEL orchestration engine, which is controlled by one of the participating business parties. The engine coordinates all of the activities in the process, and controls the system's corrective activities when exceptions occur. BPEL builds on and extends XML and Web Services specifications

The Role of BPEL

The BPEL specification defines the syntax and semantics of the BPEL language, which contains a variety of process flow constructs. It allows for conditional branching, parallel process flows, nested sub-processes, process joins, and other related features. BPEL is defined in an XML format. Just as today's software development tools include Web services in their development capabilities, there also exist easy-to-use tools to create and manage business processes using BPEL such as SoftCare�s Trade Manager. If your organization has the capability to utilize Web services for system integration, then a product to manage and control the resulting business processes is critical.

Why Do I Need BPEL?

Traditional methods for integration and business process automation typically involve embedded logic inside of applications designed to meet a specific business need such as ERP, supply chain, or CRM. The development, testing, and deployment efforts required to change these applications make integration and process changes both costly and complex.
To address these issues, proprietary EAI and static BPM products emerged to abstract integration and process automation into a new layer of software tools. These software products liberated integration and process tasks from the underlying business systems so they could be more effectively changed, managed, and optimized.
BPEL and Web services now provide a standardized integration interface and a standardized language for integration and process automation. BPEL, in effect, has the potential to commoditize the capabilities provided by proprietary EAI and BPM solutions. As often occurs in a commodity market, the resulting prices for products and services are certain to fall.

What Will Drive BPEL Adoption?

The most important case for BPEL is that proprietary EAI and static BPM solutions are just too expensive. They are expensive to develop, implement, maintain, and extend across a company�s diverse business systems environment. Proprietary integration links are often brittle, and the cost to maintain them as organizations continually evolve is a significant burden. The specialized skills required to support these proprietary solutions often create their own cost and availability concerns. The frequent result is that an overwhelming amount of tight IT budgets end up being consumed by maintenance, with very little left over to satisfy changing business needs.
BPEL and Web services are technologies with the potential to finally break through this impasse. Web services provide a ubiquitous, standards-based interface that can be readily accessible from inside or outside the corporate firewall. Web service standards for service discovery (UDDI) and self-description (WSDL, WSIL) actively promote and encourage rapid integration and service reuse as they enable a company to quickly find and deploy web services in a business process.
With the advent of next generation BPEL compliant development tools, the expensive development cycles of the past are replaced with low cost integration and process changes, enabling a new level of organizational agility through orchestrated Web services. As more and more business applications create Web services interfaces, BPEL will provide a much better �bang for the bucks� as compared with proprietary integration solutions.

How Will BPEL Be Used?

Within the corporate firewall, BPEL has the potential to standardize application-to-application integration and extend integration to previously isolated systems. As a result of years of proprietary integration efforts, a variety of integration tools and solutions exist in the enterprise today. This remains true in organizations that adopt high-end EAI products, as the cost-benefit analysis of some integration needs cannot justify the use of custom EAI adapters. In contrast, BPEL holds promise as a "lowest common denominator" integration technology that delivers a ubiquitous, platform-neutral solution for lower cost.
Outside the firewall, BPEL can enable a whole new level of corporate agility as it relates to integrating and switching external vendors and services. BPEL also facilitates a company�s ability to integrate their vendors into the company business processes from outside the firewall.
By using BPEL to define business processes, companies are empowered to select best-of-breed processes and services to incorporate into their operations. This provides flexibility to replace or upgrade certain aspects of a business process without impacting the systems that are working well. For instance, a company can change their warehouse service provider without impacting their order management system, even though both may be participants in several business processes.

When should my company begin to deploy BPEL?

BPEL is rapidly becoming the defacto standard technology, with the initial vacuum of BPEL-based development tools being filled by world leading software vendors. These vendors have recognized the considerable market opportunity and responded quickly with solutions. Vendors like IBM, Collaxa, and OpenStorm offer BPEL-compliant orchestration engines, and a variety of design and development tools have been announced by industry leaders such as Microsoft and BEA.
Regarding specific deployments, BPEL makes sense for environments that already have many exposed Web service interfaces. The greater the number of Web services available, the more valuable BPEL will become. Ease of integration is the reason that Web services have emerged as one of the hottest trends in information technology. The Gartner Group predicts that by 2004 Web services will dominate deployment of new application solutions for Fortune 2000 companies, and companies that fail to adopt this technology will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. BPEL is the way to use and take advantage of those web services in daily business processing.
Finally, BPEL has the potential to significantly disrupt established EAI and BPM vendors and their markets by changing the �integration dynamic� from proprietary static �adapter� solutions to solutions which can be quickly modified to meet the needs of business to simply integrate and combine applications using Web Services and BPEL as the key engines. As a result, established EAI vendors are quickly moving to incorporate BPEL compliance into their proprietary products, and new vendors are leveraging a window of opportunity to create new products and new product categories. For BPM companies that have solutions based on older BPM approaches (such as XLANG, WSFL) that have been replaced by BPEL, the need to incorporate BPEL is just as critical.

Conclusion:

It is clear that by itself, Web services is a �great technology� without a practical way to implement it in business. What is required is a common standard on how to publish multiple services orchestrate them into business processes and audit and manage the results. That is why BPEL which becomes the �glue� to bind Web services into a cohesive business solution, facilitating their orchestrated interaction both within and between enterprises.

I've got 2 quick questions for you…

1.      What are the current challenges in your organization that you want BPEL to solve?

2.      What are the current issues you have been facing while implementing BPEL?

I would be more than happy to share my knowledge & read your comments.

Cheers,

Hakim Jamali