SAP’s Enterprise SOA

Enterprise SOA
Enterprise SOA is a conceptual architecture for SAP business applications and their development, which is based on Enterprise Services. Its foundation is similar to SAP Netweaver, which has various tools to support Enterprise SOA and Enterprise Service development.

Enterprise Services
Enterprise services are almost same as Web services. Like web services it forms the independent building block. It can be incorporated into a new or existing business process regardless of their implementation or the underlying applications or software components. Like Web services it has separate service interfaces and service implementations that confirm to Web services standards.

The difference between Enterprise services and Web services are
Enterprise services have high granularity and aggregate reusable elements with specific business value
Enterprise services support the execution of specific business tasks, such as the automatic execution of enterprise business scenarios
Enterprise services are optimized for the effective development of business processes and composite applications.
Enterprise services uses Global data types to simplify data exchange. Global data types which are defined in the Enterprise Service Repository establish globally available definitions of individual data elements. This guarantees that data sent by one enterprise service will be understood by another enterprise service because a single centrally stored definition is used by all.


SOA based environment contains loosely coupled and interoperable application services based on web services standard that operates independently of underlying platform and programming language. Individual software components may be developed in different programming languages. In this industrial standards like WSDL will define the way in which a service is accessed. And there is a strict separation between service implementation and its public interface.

In SAP, ESOA allows to integrate the functionality of both SAP and non-SAP solutions as services. These solutions could be running in SAP Netweaver platform or traditional R/3. SAP Netweaver provides an Enterprise Service Repository which has all the basic elements to build services like business objects, enterprise services and process components. These building blocks can be used to create industry specific functionality. SAP also provides enterprise services for the SAP business suite and users have the option to create custom enterprise service for same. All these components of enterprise SOA are centrally stored in Enterprise Service Repository.