Todd Biske: Outside the Box

I’m in a SAP session now. They’ve got their “End-to-End SOA Composition and Middleware Platform” picture up right now. It’s always nice when your vendor’s picture aligns with your own. Specifically, they have a separation between their Enterprise SOA Provisioning layer and their SOA Interoperability layer. Enterprise SOA Provisioning includes “Service and Event Enablement” and “Connectivity and Integration.” In SOA Interoperability, they have “Service Bus and SOA Management.” Thanks to the confusion between the ESB space and EAI space, these two layers are frequently combined, and I think they should be separate. The SOA Interoperability layer should be about mediating across a set of standards that the enterprise has adopted, which the enablement and integration layer is about hooking non-standard things into it. Push those pieces as close to the endpoints as possible, and put the stuff that’s required on all standards-based service messages in the middle. Unfortunately, they’ve now put up a slide on SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 and are positioning it to cover Service Bus, Service Integration, and SOA Management. So, conceptually they get it, but in terms of the product mapping, there could be some challenges if you don’t deploy it properly. If you separate out one PI environment for SOA Interoperability, and a second environment for Enablement and Integration, a lot of the potential risks can be mitigated.