Demystifying SOA in SAP NetWeaver

Upgrades are a fact of life in enterprise IT, but the benefits of SOA make a convincing case for NetWeaver adoption.

I like to say, with apologies to Mark Twain, that just as death and taxes are the two certainties of life, so are upgrades in the life of a software application. You can delay death and upgrades, but you cannot completely evade them.

In late 2002, SAP released SAP R/3 Enterprise (Version 4.7). Knowing they would have to upgrade to the latest version someday, many customers went ahead and did just that.

But before the dust settled on that Enterprise release, a new paradigm called SAP NetWeaver 2004 was introduced. While common sense dictates upgrading to the latest release, especially if that release has multiple value propositions as NetWeaver 2004s does, thousands of customers are not in a position to contemplate an upgrade from R/3 4.6C, R/3 Enterprise 4.7 or earlier releases. So, should you keep pushing off an upgrade, or should you bite the bullet and upgrade to NetWeaver 2004s soon in order to take advantage of its features?

If I had to recommend just one feature that is worth upgrading for, it would be the ability to build applications in the form of services that can be exposed to the external world and reused by adopting standard industry protocols -- service-oriented architecture (SOA).

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