SAP Boom is Here to Stay (Part Four)

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration

To be sure, the promise of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is very real, and mainstream enterprise transitioning to SOA is assuredly more of a question of ‘when’ than ‘if.’ In the fourth and final installment of this article that examines key contributing factors to a sustained boom for SAP consultants, I take a look at how amassing SOA momentum will create opportunities for SAP consultants in the years ahead.

SOA has only just begun, and SAP is committed to an SOA future

Despite relentless marketing, SOA today is still very much in its nascent stage. According to a recent report from Saugatuck Research, “SOA adoption has been moving at a snail’s pace within enterprises.” Saugatuck research indicates that relatively few user enterprises worldwide have deployed SOA beyond departmentally driven trials and proofs of concept.

SAP has long been at the forefront of the SOA wave, and SAP’s particular flavor of service-oriented architecture, called Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), is enabled by the SAP NetWeaver integration middleware, which SAP first introduced in 2003. Today, virtually all SAP applications run on NetWeaver, and market adoption of SAP NetWeaver is growing steadily, with more than 13,760 customer deployments in production.

In a nutshell, service-oriented architecture enables business processes to be combined and orchestrated for greater business agility. In technical terms, SOA is an integration and architecture framework that supports loosely coupled services and enables interoperability among new and legacy systems. It allows those systems to expose part of their functionality to other applications in a standard way. For enterprises, the adoption of SOA provides significant potential to improve the value they derive from their IT investments in terms of increased flexibility, improved use of assets, alignment with business objectives, and reduced integration costs.

Despite the gradual uptake of SOA, Gartner heralds SOA as the undeniable future of IT. The research firm predicts that service-oriented architecture will be used in more than 50 percent of new mission-critical operational applications and business processes designed in 2007 and in more than 80 percent by 2010. Gartner research director Frank Kenney recommends that organizations “aggressively invest in SOA, as it will rapidly become the architectural foundation for virtually every new business-critical application.”

It often happens that skills lag a bit behind the introduction of a new technology, and this appears to be the case with SOA. Gartner predicts that by 2010, less than 25 percent of large companies will have the sufficient technical and organizational skills necessary to deliver enterprise-wide SOA, creating a tremendous opportunity for appropriately trained SAP consultants.

For its part, SAP is working mightily to narrow this skills gap and propel SOA adoption. Since the creation of SAP SDN in September 2003, more than 700,000 members worldwide have joined the community, helping drive adoption of SAP NetWeaver. In addition, there are more than 10,000 consultants trained to support customers using SAP NetWeaver.

Clearly, SAP pros familiar with NetWeaver and possessing experience as system architects, business analysts and process modelers will fare extremely well over the next decade as SAP NetWeaver and SOA gain traction.

In addition, the adoption of SOA fuels the demand for master data management (MDM) and business intelligence (BI) expertise. The consensus among industry pundits is that MDM is vital to realizing the promise of SOA. According to Gartner, “You won't get the business agility from SOA unless you build an enterprise information management layer first […] You will waste your investment in SOA unless you have enterprise information that SOA can exploit." Forrester points out that, "SOA by itself does nothing to address the question of how data should be managed within this architecture,” and Forrester analyst Ray Wang underscores the fundamental importance of MDM to any business intelligence (BI) initiative: “If you really wanted your BI to work you’d solve the master data issue.”

As SOA moves beyond the conceptual level and into real-word deployment, the demand for SAP consultants with demonstrable MDM and BI skills and experience will grow exponentially – extending the robust environment for SAP consulting skills even further.