HP E-Services
Despite the explosive growth of the Internet, many web applications are still created on an individual basis. A good example is the online retailing giant Amazon.com, which constantly keeps adding to its portal software. HP envisages a world where people and businesses derive new value from the Internet by moving beyond web-based access to information. HP's vision is about the mass proliferation of e-services. These services will be modular, transforming the web from a do-it-yourself model into a do-it-for-me model. An e-service can be an IT resource, just as CPU and storage capacity will be delivered as e-services via the Internet. The classic outsourcing model will transform from MIPS on demand to complete business applications on demand. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg.
There are a myriad of electronic services that can be deployed, including the following:
Travel agencies coordinating schedules while their customers are on the road,
Publishing services for the monthly company financial report,
Subscriptions to local tax calculation offices, and
Global positioning services linking up with a traffic routing service to provide real-time traffic information.
In a world of e-services, the static pre-arrangement of service contracts and point-to-point links gives way to finding the appropriate resource in real time when needed. For example, instead of configuring and maintaining a set of preferred vendors for a given part, a company can post a request for that part to the community. The various part vendors, established and new ones, can reply then with their offer. Dynamic brokering will be the most significant change in the field of conducting electronic business. HP has acknowledged this trend and created e-speak, a framework for describing and locating resources and services, metering and billing their usage (see Figure 12-10). At the core, the SAP business framework and the HP e-speak technology complement each other to provide the business community with this critical feature. As a cornerstone of HP's e-services, e-speak is an open service platform that allows e-services to interact and perform services for each other in a secure, dynamic, and manageable way. It enables the creation of Internet services as a dynamic composition of services commissioned as needed. This section outlines the impact e-speak has on mySAP.com.
Figure 12-10. E-Speak Dynamic Brokering Service
E-speak allows a resource, for example, a computing device, an application, or data content, to be treated as a virtualized service that can be accessed through the same interface. The e-speak core software provides two elements: (1) a universal e-services API and, (2) the runtime engine. The runtime engine is executed on any device that participates in the e-speak environment. Supporting a heterogeneous world, there is no attempt to replace any existing standard or system. E-speak complements them on the service level, and its modular architecture allows the core to be layered on top of standard networking protocols. Built into the e-speak core are dynamic brokering capabilities and support for registration and billing services. The e-speak representation of services, that is, meta-data, allows for an automated reasoning about services. Through the consistent interface, application designers are provided with a simple and elegant abstraction of any services they wish to implement or access. In order to encourage broad acceptance, HP made the core of e-speak freely available to the developer community.
Integrating E-Speak with mySAP.com
The e-speak core itself is the instance on each system platform that acts as the point of access to resources. On behalf of the client, the e-speak core manages a context in order to provide a naming and security boundary, as well as mediates the request between the client and the target service. An e-speak bridge acts as a gateway between the SAP application programs, written in ABAP, and the e-speak core. All requests from an ABAP program will be routed to this module, and vice versa. The primary goal is to access external services available through e-speak and to allow any other entity to access defined ABAP resources through the same mechanism.
A Simple Example
Within the R/3 system, a common functionality allows selecting the address of a supplier for various business transactions. Special transactions within the SAP R/3 system enable addition, change, and removal of the supplier information. However, in today's fast moving world, chances are that the information in the local database is not up to date. Constant effort is required to keep the supplier information current.
To demonstrate the capabilities of the e-service concept, a service was implemented into a standard transaction enabling the verification of telephone numbers. For any address of a local supplier invoiced by the transaction, the Yellow Pages were checked for validation. In the demonstration, the service was called by a click on a button. However, in reality, an automated e-service can be implemented easily (see Figure 12-11).
Figure 12-11. E-Service Example: Yellow Pages for SAP
The benefits are immediately obvious. First, the application deals only with the most current and correct information. Next, there is no need for maintaining a local supplier database that has to be updated every time a supplier relationship changes. Finally, application logic that is required for the validation and correction of supplier information can largely be eliminated. All it took was a link to an e-service! The example shows the opportunities of integration of e-speak capabilities in SAP. Using the e-speak bridge, standard transactions can be enhanced easily with automatic access to e-services offered via the Internet.
To illustrate an additional example, let's consider the dynamic integration of e-services into the mySAP.com workplace Launch Pad.
Even the traditional Internet comes up with an overwhelming amount of web sites offering all kinds of services, most of which appear questionable. However, occasionally a useful page emerges that successfully conquers a new niche market. Chances are good that exploiting this dynamically changing new business scenario can create serious competitive advantages for those who are well equipped to do so.
Niche market is the key word. Because it will be rare for more than a few players to exist in these niche markets, there is no business case for SAP to go after it and to provide a generic component to cover it. The outcome is that the best way for SAP to deal with this situation is to allow an integration of these Internet offerings into their workplace as seamless as possible. This is necessary because it is a strategic goal of SAP to position its marketplace as the software of choice with which an employee can cover almost all of his daily business. The workplace is well equipped for the current situation, because it allows addition of any URL to the personalized workplace.
It will no longer be adequate to hardwire to one provider by incorporating a URL to the provider's web page. Imagine a Launch Pad entry that is not statically connected to a URL but can be dynamically unbound from it. What remains will be a placeholder linked to an internal description of the service. Using standardized e-speak contracts and vocabularies, the description can be used easily by e-speak to find providers of the service on an as-needed basis during runtime.
Regarding the mini-apps available in the Workplace GUI, for example, an employee adds a stock-ticker service to his or her personal workplace by referring to a well-known URL. Invoking it, the user may realize that the service is temporarily unavailable or has been completely removed. Now e-speak can be invoked to report a list of comparable stock-ticker services available on the Internet. By finding an offering that suits the user's needs this way, the new offering may be bound to the unbound entry on her workplace. This is a simple example with a small but easy-to-understand benefit, but the model can be expanded to allow seamless integration of any web-enabled application into the workplace.
It should be stated that replacing unavailable services could easily be automated completely. Binding service descriptions of a role to URLs may become part of the SAP customizing process. In addition, SAP will be capable of adding external services to its standard role definitions without necessarily referring to one specific vendor using e-speak service descriptions.