SOA (SERVICE ORIENTATED ARCHITECTURE)

SAP EDUCATION LAUNCHES NEW SOA TRAINING!

The introduction of SAP NetWeaver, and the evolution of the Business Process Platform will allow customers tobuild and deploy a dynamic model of their business. Importantly, using this approach, SAP is moving on from thetraditional “one size fits all” approach to software. Every company will be able to construct its own unique businessusing the building blocks of web services. Fundamentally this is a customisation process enabling customers toconfigure an existing set of processes into the precise subset – or superset – that forms the operational core oftheir company. SOA will herald new possibilities for tailoring business processes to match the real worldrequirements.

It is effectively a very simple process – that is the whole point! SOA is designed to allow fast, effective (andtherefore cheap) deployment of SAP software. Using a modelling environment, customers are able to chooseeither existing predefined processes, or start building their own from existing services. These individual servicesrefer to specific functionality available in the SAP Business Suite. The big advantage of using web services as thefoundation for this approach, is that they use completely open standards, and so non-SAP functionality can beintegrated within these processes as easily as SAP functions.

Clearly this is a very different approach to deploying SAP systems, and so the skills required are going to bedifferent to those of a traditional SAP consultant. A number of new key roles have been identified:

Enterprise Architect – evaluate business requirements, understand the technology capabilities, designand deploy the model

Business Process Expert – model and orchestrate business process and user interfaces using modellingand simple development tools

Enterprise Service Developer – enterprise service creation and composition

This is the start of an exciting time for SAP and SAP Education. As our first contribution, SAP Education iscurrently rolling out training and certification to support these new roles.

Enterprise Architect

Certification for Enterprise Architects is currently being offered at the Associate level. Other higher level exams willfollow in the future. In order to achieve Associate level certification, delegates should attend the SOA100(Enterprise SOA Fundamentals – 2 days) and SOA200 (SAP Enterprise Architect Framework for enterprise SOA –5 days).

Other supporting courses for an Enterprise Architect include the courses SOA230 (SAP Enterprise ArchitectModelling with Aris – 2 days) and the SOA250 (Advanced Enterprise Architect Framework for enterprise SOA – 5days). These are expected to form the basis of the Professional exam when available.

Business Process Expert

Certification for Business Process Experts will also available at two levels, Certified Business Process Associate,and Certified Business Process Professional – this latter certification is still under development, and should beavailable Q4 2009. In order to achieve Associate level certification, delegates should attend BPM100 (Methodology- 2 days), BPM130 (Business Designer - 2 days), BPM300 (Governance Overview - 3 days). The BusinessProcess Professional will include SOA120 (Business Process Modeling - 2 days), BPM150 (SAP Business Serverand Publisher, Enterprise Modeling, Process Optimization and Performance - 2 days), BPM140 (Model ToExecution - 3 days) and BPM310 (Governance in Detail - 3 days).

Enterprise Service Developer

As yet there are no developed certifications for this role, but these are under development. This curriculum is beingdesigned to incorporate the latest technology for the development environment, including the new CompositionEnvironment released with SAP NetWeaver 7.1. Enterprise Service Developers will certainly need skills in existingdevelopment technologies though, including Web Dynpro for Java, Web Dynpro for ABAP, Composite ApplicationFramework, and Visual Composer.