Where is Real SOA

In my last post I was clear on what is happening to SaaS BI. Since then we had seen many changes in the SaaS area. One thing is clear. All these BI vendors out there are battling to survive. While traditional on premise vendors are announcing cloud offerings and niche players are still determining right technology and business model that can make them sustainable in the long run.

Is world business ready for such offerings. Its compelling in theory and logic. But logic will not apply always in real world. No sense sometimes is common sense.

I was working on SOA project for one of my client who had spent millions of money on SAP implementation. He has simple question. Can he get process analytics out of the processes that run in SAP. I jumped the bandwagon. I gave huge presentation to them on what SAP offers as Process Integration (PI) and CE (Composite Environment). What is Business Process Management offering from SAP.

How we can configure and create Enterprise Services in SAP in Enterprise Service Repository. It all looked well and nice. I got POC.

I started POC with my SAP consultant who created simple leave application and showed them how it can be done. Super, accolades all across.

I was asked to work on Procure to Pay process as project.

That's when reality checked in.

What we found was that SAP that's been implemented has got many exceptions embedded and its not the way SAP recommends. There are many process gaps which manifested in core SAP implementation. Its so difficult for me to enable the services because there are lot of ifs and buts.

Even the CIO was surprised rather shocked to see this. He asked me to configure the BPM as per SAP and then do GAP analysis. I am still working on it.

Point here is simple. technology out there enables us to configure and consume data and functionality through web services. All we need to do is do it right.

I wait for day where I can consume data visualization as service and add my data to it and consume it. Is it not possible in simple way, yes it is.