SAP implementations based on NetWeaver benefit on several fronts, including
Development cost is decreased.
Integration is enabled, speeding up time to deploy as well as shrinking the time necessary to perform system upgrades and so on.
Total cost of ownership is reduced significantly because maintenance and support costs are dramatically reduced.
Thus, innovation is enabled; IT can spend more time meeting the needs of the business, and less time maintaining existing solutions.
SAP NetWeaver changed the enterprise applications playing field when it was introduced, as discussed next.
When SAP NetWeaver was introduced, SAP AG's primary goal was to decrease the time necessary to implement and integrate diverse applications typically brought together to create enterprise-class solutions. This was to be accomplished by leveraging a common technology platformSAP's Web Application Server, or WebASalong with a common method of tying everything together, a common web-based front-end access method, and a method for both managing master data and enabling business intelligence.
Although not originally envisioned as NetWeaver-specific, SAP's WebASa "new" and more comprehensive Basis layerwas designed to simplify installation, integration, and ongoing maintenance. Additionally, SAP AG wanted to give developers a choice, adding Java/J2EE support to SAP's mainstay ABAP/4. Finally, from the onset, SAP AG intended to integrate Internet Transaction Server into a common platform; this was finally accomplished with WebAS version 6.40.
WebAS also provides enhanced support for XML and Web Services technologies, including SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Definition Language). With support for Unicode offered as of WebAS 6.30, the capability to standardize on a particular company-wide technology platform relative to matters as diverse as language support also makes a compelling argument for deploying what ultimately morphed into the platform undergirding NetWeaver.
By the Way
Unicode refers to how the letters and numbers used by a particular language are encoded so they can be understood and used in a computing environment. Unicode unifies all characters of all character sets (that is, languages) into a single encoding scheme such that all letters, numbers, and other characters are uniquely represented. In other words, Unicode gives each character in each language its own unique computer-readable numeric representation. Doing otherwise requires transforming between different encoding schemes running on different computers, and therefore represents a potential risk in terms of data loss or corruption, as well as a performance hit. In SAP, non-Unicode systems use characters that are represented in binary (the lowest level of computer language) with only one byte, whereas Unicode systems represent characters in binary with two or four bytes (to make it possible to account for the many characters across all character sets). The downside for a system that has implemented Unicode is that the same data takes up more spaceup to twice as much space in the database as a non-Unicode system. For more information, read SAP Note 79991 or visit http://service.sap.com/unicode.
Issues surrounding system integration and data management are not new; IT has spent years applying what amounts to bandages to these severe problems. With this knowledge, SAP AG sought to simplify and modularize integration, enabling a hub and spoke middleware approach to tying systems together while consolidating master data into a single repository. SAP's Exchange Infrastructure (XI) and Master Data Management (MDM) products are the fruit of this vision, the products underneath the umbrella of NetWeaver.
Although deployment can be very complex, SAP XI itself is a model of simplicity and effectiveness. It enables process-centric collaboration of SAP and non-SAP applications alike, through the exchange of XML messages. In doing so, the business connectors are both standardized and straightforward, an elegant solution to the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) issues faced by so many IT organizations today.
By the Way SAP XI picks up where SAP's Application Link Enabling (ALE) technology left off, enabling simpler communication and the exchange of information between SAP systems and other enterprise systems.
In the same way, SAP's solution for enabling data visibility between and within multiple applications is equally elegant. The need is certainly hugemanaging the uncontrolled proliferation of part numbers, product descriptions, and so on adds considerable cost to the business. And such problems add unnecessary complexity to an otherwise solid supply chain or inventory management system, too. Finally, MDM answers the problem of poor customer management and an inability to conduct cross-business-group reportingtruly a better answer than trying to keep a number of ERP and other "systems of record" synchronized.
SAP Enterprise Portal
If SAP XI represents the middleware portion of a solution, SAP Enterprise Portal (EP) represents the front-end. The vision of EP is simpleto enable portal-like access to SAP and non-SAP resources through the use of a web browser rather than SAP's proprietary user interface. SAP AG also tells us that Enterprise Portal is nothing less than the "People Integration" layer long used to describe how the various components of NetWeaver work together.
In a wise move, SAP AG has not required EP to play a part in a NetWeaver deployment. True, EP makes sense at a lot of different levels to deploy. By leaving the decision to a company's business units and IT organization, though, SAP has provided exactly the kind of flexibility promised by NetWeaver. To read more about Enterprise Portal.
A real-time enterprise application like SAP R/3 or ECC affords access to transactional information and to a lesser extent historical data. But these ERP solutions are decidedly (and purposely) single minded, not providing visibility into multiple ERP systems without a certain amount of special and therefore relatively costly integration work. For this reason, NetWeaver sought to include Business Intelligence within its umbrella of products and components, specifically the mature and capable SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW).
Business Intelligence is a big word for a more common termdata warehousing. In a data warehouse, information is organized differently than in other database systems, so as to provide rapid access across different kinds of raw data, turning it into information useful in conducting analysis (hence another widely used term, analytics) in the process. The fact that companies can use this newfound valuable information to enable better decision-making is what helped coin the term Business Intelligence.
By including SAP BW in NetWeaver, the capability to conduct "roll-up reporting" across multiple systems provides great value beyond what can be provided otherwise. SAP BW allows visibility across the enterprise, from core transactional systems like ECC and R/3 to Supply Chain products, Customer Relationship products, Product Lifecycle offerings, and more. If Enterprise Portal is the "front-end" to NetWeaver, SAP BW represents a "back-end" that provides business insight into and across each standalone SAP application.
In today's world, NetWeaver has been simplified to further ease administrative and maintenance support. Beginning in 2004, SAP adopted a synchronized approach to providing new versions of NetWeaver. Instead of requiring numerous technology-specific adapters to "connect" SAP's products to one another, NetWeaver '04 shipped with the same version of WebAS powering mySAP ERP, SCM, SRM, and so on. In doing so, a common technical foundation was facilitated. And the added advantage was that as this WebAS foundation matured, its new capabilities could be leveraged across the entire solution spectrum, not just in the case of a couple of leading-edge SAP components.
The same approach is true of SAP NetWeaver '05as WebAS and all the other NetWeaver components continue to mature, provide greater flexibility, and reduce overall costs, SAP makes it possible to standardize on a single computing platform. And as NetWeaver and its components continue to evolve, it can only be expected that capabilities will continue to expand, all the while lowering costs.
NetWeaver '05 and its predecessor NetWeaver '04 are labels that indicate that the fundamental WebAS platform underneath each of the SAP components within this NetWeaver release are essentially the same. In this way, it is easy to identify a particular "flavor" of NetWeaver with a particular version of WebAS.
As NetWeaver evolves in response to a changing world, SAP has bet the bank on a number of technologies and approaches intended to further minimize integration headaches, total cost of ownership, and so on. These include
ESA, or Enterprise Services Architecture
Web Services, the backbone and enabler of ESA
Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) provides the blueprint for designing and deploying SAP NetWeaver. It is SAP's adaptation of the more generic Service Oriented Architecture. SAP's ESA concept revolves around the vision of providing a roadmap for modeling and extending SAP NetWeaver. It acts as a blueprint for designing your SAP system landscape, much like three-tiered architectures helped organizations define their traditional SAP systems in the past.
Web Services represent the vehicle that makes ESA possible. They are beginning to become the new standard for interapplication communication. The idea is that Web Services are "open"; they're not tied to a particular type of technology or hardware or software vendor. This platform independence therefore makes it possible to communicate between vastly different technology platforms. At the end of the day, your developers have more time to focus on implementing valuable services, rather than spending their time figuring out the intricacies of technical communications protocols. This makes ESA and Web Services a valuable attribute of your NetWeaver solution.