Helping IT Organizations Become More Strategic
The SAP NetWeaver® technology platform helps you run and manage business processes, optimize performance, and reduce costs. By delivering consistent, reliable information, the technology platform helps increase efficiency and productivity. By providing the correct business and informational context – along with powerful analytical functionality – it increases your insight into data. It can improve your connectivity and communication by extending your business processes across applications to business units as well as partners. As the technical foundation for service-oriented architecture ( SOA), SAP NetWeaver powers adaptable software solutions that enable IT to drive profits through better transparency – at lower costs.
SOA is an open IT architecture in which functionality can be grouped around business processes and packaged as interoperable services that act as interchangeable process building blocks to deliver specific services to applications. This allows you to extend business processes, for example, from ordering to inventory to accounting – without having to change underlying applications. SAP NetWeaver is the technical foundation for SOA.
ENABLING EFFICIENCY, INSIGHT, AND FLEXIBILITY
As you well know, the global marketplace is volatile: regulations, economic conditions, competitive factors, and consumer buying behavior are in constant flux. Market consolidation and reductions in demand lead companies to downsize, cut production, consolidate operations, and curb plans for growth and expansion. Organizations must move quickly to address challenges and seize opportunities. But operational efficiency, effectiveness, and performance may suffer across the enterprise as a result. Leading companies realize that to succeed they must deploy strategies faster than the rest of the market and close the gap between core strategic goals and operational execution. With IT as a strategic partner in the business, your technology can help keep you ahead of the competition as your operations gain agility to support continuous business improvement. Technology is integral to core business processes – without IT, business doesn’t get done. In supporting core business processes, IT contributes to your success in a critical way. Yet strategic IT must go further to advance cost-saving measures and strengthen relationships, not only across the enterprise, but also throughout your ecosystem.
Toward a Business-Driven Enterprise Architecture
IT needs to help the business create new processes, products, and services to drive revenues and profits while continuing to support core operations efficiently and effectively. To meet these diverse challenges, savvy IT organizations are adopting a flexible service-oriented architecture (SOA) and unified technology platform. Based on open standards, SOA facilitates and enables connectivity and communication with partners beyond organizational boundaries. And SOA does so with greater ease and at lower cost than traditional information architectures can offer.
SOA is an open IT architecture in which functionality can be grouped around business processes and packaged as interoperable services. These interoperable services act as interchangeable process building blocks to deliver specific services to applications. This allows you to extend business processes, for example, from ordering to inventory to accounting – without having to change underlying applications.
Support for Best-in-Class Business Processes
All SAP® Business Suite applications are based on the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform, which integrates them naturally and with relative ease. SAP NetWeaver integrates your non- SAP applications across the enterprise as well. This helps your business users get needed information faster because the applications can interact with each other even if they were not originally designed to do so. Your business content becomes accessible to applications, business processes, and analytics functionality. SAP NetWeaver is also the ideal technology platform to integrate SAP and non-SAP software. It reduces total cost of ownership across the entire IT landscape and supports the evolution of applications to SOA, the extensible architecture that SAP NetWeaver is designed to leverage.
With SAP NetWeaver, you can transition your existing IT infrastructure into a more flexible environment. You gain the technical foundation and tools to compose, extend, and rearrange your business processes. And, as you would expect, you are able to efficiently orchestrate and manage those processes. In addition, SAP NetWeaver provides support for best-in-class business processes and allows you to deploy solutions at a pace that suits your organization’s growth plans and strategic goals.
Leverage SAP NetWeaver to:
- Empower people to connect with the business from any place with any device
- Compose new business processes quickly for changing business needs
- Manage master data and identities across all systems for accurate data everywhere
- Deliver relevant information to improve decision making and business insight
- Integrate systems and partners into core processes, support end-to-end automation
- Run and optimize IT operations using a consolidated technology platform
As a foundation for SOA, the SAP NetWeaver technology platform allows you to deploy SOA-enabled solutions that empower you to run, manage, improve, and adapt business processes. In addition, you gain insight on how to optimize performance and where to reduce costs.
SAP NetWeaver unifies your technology on a single platform to reduce IT complexity and costs across a heterogeneous environment of enterprise applications, point solutions, legacy software, and data silos. As a result, you can consolidate applications, data, and user interfaces (see Figure 2). This frees your IT resources to focus on developing and implementing strategic, innovative software that adds value to your business network.
Because SAP NetWeaver is based on open standards, you gain a technological foundation for improved communication. Better communication supports efficient collaboration with business units across the enterprise. Yet SAP NetWeaver extends IT beyond the organization, letting you strengthen relationships with customers, suppliers, and partners to build solutions and innovate strategies with members throughout your ecosystem.
