Teaming up on Enterprise SOA

Foundry Networks among the first networking vendors to be certified by SAP.

A number of trends are affecting the way enterprises use and deploy information technology and software applications to remain competitive. These trends include Globalization and Mobility; the Extended Enterprise, where corporate boundaries are no longer static and easily definable; Web-enabled Applications, which have been adopted by most major software vendors; and Centralization and Compliance, which involves moving applications back to a corporate data center to reduce costs and to comply with laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, and HIPAA.

These trends have created new challenges for IT departments as they try to satisfy the demands of their end users and the CFO. These demands include providing seamless, secure access to applications, as well as a consistent user experience, with high performance and high-availability for users everywhere at the same or reduced costs.

To achieve this, application and network infrastructure groups must work closely together from the earliest planning phases of application implementation projects.

Foundry Joins the SAP Enterprise Services Community
As part of a plan to strengthen relationships with leading application vendors, Foundry Networks began the testing certification process at SAP's Palo Alto labs on October 29. SAP is certifying networking products for the first time, and Foundry will be among the first networking vendors to be certified by SAP. Engineers will test and certify three main scenarios:

• Network for Enterprise SOA Performance Optimization
• Network Security for Enterprise SOA Solutions
• Enterprise SOA Landscapes Access Reliability and Availability through Networks

SAP launched the Enterprise Services (ES) Community in April 2006 as part of the company's commitment to enterprise SOA. The community is a co-innovation working environment—a technical forum for partners and customers to define business processes and enterprise services with SAP, directly influencing and prioritizing the enterprise services definitions that SAP implements.

The first mission of the ES community members is to understand the SAP application environment and to identify the availability, performance, and security requirements for this environment.

The SAP Application Environment
The business needs of today's enterprises, in particular the push for enterprises to globalize, are driving the evolution of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software as a platform for transitioning to an Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (E-SOA). E-SOA is intended to support the business processes of the extended enterprise, which encompasses a corporation and its global subsidiaries, business partners, and customers.

While classical ERP applications are mostly headquarter-centric software deployments with application servers and end users in a shared local area network environment, E-SOA application software components and end users are spread out worldwide and connected via a WAN.

An ERP transaction is usually executed by a specialized employee, for instance a procurement manager, who creates a purchase order. By Web-service enabling these types of transactions, it becomes easier to integrate applications and chain transactions together to create a 'composite application.'

From this business application-centric view, it is important to recognize that the different parts of a composite application need to connect end users with different business functions in ERP systems and also connect a variety of ERP systems that reside in one or more different company data centers and might also reside outside a company's network, for instance linking to a business partner's ERP systems.

Not having all business connectivity in a local LAN adds new requirements for supporting network services in a distributed application deployment:

• Performance: Transmitting data around the world can be slowed significantly due to unavoidable network latency times and network congestion.
• Reliability: The network links and services themselves need to be designed for end-to-end reliability.
• Security: Since company boundaries have been expanded to include connectivity to external parties and access to a company's confidential business applications, all communications should be secured.
• Costs: The increased overall complexity of IT needs to be considered in estimating the overall cost of application development.

Any Web-enabled and Web-service based application implementation project must consider the impact on, and requirements for, a company's network infrastructure from the earliest planning stages. Application and network groups in the IT department need to cooperate for smooth worldwide application deployments at reasonable costs.