Big4Guy

A lot of readers over the last few months have asked about service oriented architecture and related concepts. Below, I am attempting to cover some of the basics one should know about service SOA oriented architecture. Traditionally, organisations have been on distributed systems. To take a simple example, organisations will have a inventory management system which is seperate from the general ledger system. From a business point of view, these two systems are seperate. Customizations can be made to make these two systems talk to each other so that inventory figures can flow into the company's balance sheet. Middleware packages normally help to connect these distributed systems.

Over time, businesses have found that connecting distributed systems through customizations and through middleware packages is a costly and time consuming process. There definetly has to be an easier way of connecting these systems. Here is where the concept of Service Oriented Architecture comes into picture. SOA aims at accessing data or functionality from any system software across the globe by communication using a public language such as XML extensible markup language. By making all systems and pieces of data come on a common platform, software systems can become On-Demand. Software systems underlying the businesses thus can be looked at as web services which can be invoked at any time. The entire enterprise architecture is based on web services accessible 24X7 which becomes a service oriented architecture. The above example is a simple way of explaining the concept of SOA.

BW Certification Exam Questions
SAP BW Application Consultant
SAP BW Reporting Agent Configuration
Data Filtering in SAP BW