(January 21, 2003) - SAP AG's new Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) is SAP's blueprint for complete, services-based business solutions, allowing companies to drive additional business value from existing technology investments, and enabling, for the first time, enterprise-scale usage of Web services. By combining SAP's business process and industry solution expertise with the openness of Web services and other technology standards, SAP's ESA provides companies with a template for the creation of fully integrated IT environments built entirely on services-based business solutions that extend across systems and beyond business boundaries. Going forward, all SAP solutions will be developed using the ESA blueprint.

The company also launched recently SAP NetWeaver, the next evolution of mySAP Technology, SAP's integration and application platform, which provides the technology foundation to enable an ESA.

An ESA outlines how an integration and application platform is used to orchestrate business processes by means of packaged composite applications across existing systems leveraging Web services. An ESA introduces a new layer of flexibility to manage all aspects of a given business process, including people (all roles participating across the value chain), systems (SAP or non-SAP), and information (structured or unstructured). Services-based architectures are universally recognized as the way to solve the growing integration challenge. An ESA enables the design of a complete, services-based solution for a given business process/problem that uses existing systems and applications while accelerating the deployment of new functionality.

SAP has already begun to deliver on the promise of ESA with the first shipments of SAP xApps, a new breed of packaged composite applications that snap-on to existing IT environments. Additional details about the ESA blueprint can be found at www.sap.com/company/publications/.