Betting on SAP ESA.

We’ve been waiting, and here we are! We are now in 2008, which means that 2007 is already in the past, and the end of 2007 was the magic date when all SAP applications, including mySAP Business Suite or ECC or whatever it’s called now, will be completely covered by SAP services architecture, SAP ESA. The first detailed announcements came as early as 2003, with SAP keeping on track through those four years.

I don’t believe anyone expected that we are going to get 100% coverage. It takes time. I was quite skeptical, after reading all exciting announcements of Open BAPI Network since 1997 and years later, still using illegal tricks to work with SAP, instead of published and SAP-blessed interfaces. When I checked the ESA services directory at SDN back in 2006, it looked even poorer than BAPI directory. A couple of months ago, though I did not write what have I found and what I haven’t in 2006, I could say that SAP did a significant progress.

My primary interest in their new offer is the possibility to shift from dirty database stuff, yet more dirty tricks with internal functions and the frustration with incomplete BAPIs to some well documented way of exploring and updating SAP data and of course, connecting SAP with other systems. From what I could read, we’ll soon be able to forget the syntax of SQL SELECTs, the knowledge paid with our sweat and our employers’ money.

While SAP was integrating the ESA support and the development of the ESA connections to SAP internal business logic was far away, companies could already use ESA/SOA to have SAP talking in SOA language to the systems that already expose business functionality through services. That means, as soon as you install NetWeaver, which has ESA support since, I think, 2003, you could, in your SAP programs (ABAP or Java-based), simply speaking, read or update data in your external system that exposes business logic as services. And in this other system you could call services exposed by your SAP as soon as you have implemented them yourself. If you wanted, say, read a sales order from your SAP system, you still had to do this with BAPIs or in some other way. You had to wait for 2008 to come to have both sides of story.

Now, the new era is coming. We can’t say it’s already here, even if it has to be according to press releases. The most important for us is to know the following:

1. What do we have with ESA today.

2. How good is the progress that SAP is having implementing their new architecture in each application.

In the next weeks I’m going to make some kind of analysis of SAP’s current offer, in terms of what business functionality is exposed today in the latest version of ESA. I don’t need to have the latest version at work to do that because everything we need to know can be found at SAP SDN Enterprise Services Workplace. In the past ten years I had to do technical work with most of SAP R/3 modules, minus HR, plus SAP APO. (Those days it’s mostly production planning related). I’ll try to cover the areas where I have some general idea, so that at the end we could see whether we should rush buy books about the services jungle.

Stay tuned!