Is the increasing speed and scope of change in business demanding corresponding changes to your IT infrastructure? To drive competitive advantage and add value to your entire business network, you must evolve your existing IT infrastructure into a more flexible environment that avoids work redundancies and reduces complexity.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a business-driven software architecture that enables this evolution. With SOA, you can compose applications and enable business processes rapidly using enterprise services, thus improving both software reuse and your to respond quickly to change.

You can leverage service-oriented architecture by creating a business process platform – the prerequisite for the controlled and cost-effective deployment of the architecture. In fact, SAP delivers all the building blocks you need to evolve your IT infrastructure into a custom business process platform based on SOA:

• Ready-to-execute software for business processes – The SAP Business Suite family of business applications provides out-of-the-box functionality for running core business processes that are easily adaptable using enterprise services.
• Reusable enterprise services that enable business process steps – SAP solutions support business activities that are modularized into process steps and exposed through enterprise services. These process steps are stored in the enterprise services repository and share common business semantics to improve governance.
• A technology platform that enables flexible business processes – As the technology platform for SOA, SAP NetWeaver enables you to integrate, compose, deliver, and manage SAP and non-SAP applications across a heterogeneous landscape.

SAP Understands Your Industry

No business is generic. See how business process platforms have led to innovation in the following industries:

• Banking
• Chemicals
• Consumer Products
• High Tech
• Insurance
• Mill Products
• Professional Services
• Public sector
• Retail
• Utilities

To implement your business process platform, start with preconfigured software from SAP and customize your environment by building upon these SAP offerings, taking advantage of a wealth of offerings from SAP partners.