SAP announced that it has delivered a complete accompaniment of service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies, ready-to-run services and comprehensive support offerings to help companies achieve additional business value and increased IT efficiencies. With SOA as the de facto market standard and mass adoption underway, customers can turn to SAP for a simplified, comprehensive option for executing a sound SOA strategy that delivers rapid value. The breadth of offerings from SAP addresses the full lifecycle of SOA projects -- from development to deployment and ongoing management -- making the transition to SOA easy and affordable. By taking advantage of hands-on guidance through SAP's methodology, customers can accelerate business network transformation.

Small, midsize and large enterprises around the world face the need to drive a more global approach to business, manage faster transformational changes in market conditions and cope with increased customer power in networked economies. As a result, companies are continually looking for ways to innovate business processes while reducing the amount of expense, time and effort associated with driving the operation of their business. Companies need a comprehensive architecture that is based on an open platform to govern their IT landscape in order to enable change, and are increasingly adopting enterprise SOA to fill those needs. Enterprise SOA, SAP's approach to SOA, focuses on easily linking stand-alone standard processes to quickly compose new end-to-end processes. In addition, the approach selectively redesigns existing processes to make rapid changes and facilitate seamless design across company boundaries to include business partners.

"SAP's approach to SOA has enabled Offentliche to improve customer management for further growth, as well as made us more efficient and effective," said Dennis Lidzba, managing director IT, Offentliche Insurance (Versicherung Braunschweig). "Through the use of Web services, we are able to provide our customers with online processes and our partners with an online environment where interfacing with different systems is flexible."

End-to-End Professional Services for Scalable Business Solutions
The set of innovative professional services and tools offered by SAP ensures customers have the ability to complete their SOA road maps and move forward on projects, maximizing success at every step. The professional service portfolio from SAP covers all phases of a company's transition to SOA -- from initial exploration to training end users to take advantage of newly introduced functionality. The portfolio includes:

• Starter Kit for Enterprise SOA
• Methodology for Accelerated Transformation to Enterprise SOA
• Packaged Composite Implementations
• Value Prototyping

SAP Consulting, Custom Development and Education Maximize Customer Success
Customization is a primary characteristic of SOA projects. Through a combination of offerings from the SAP Custom Development and SAP Education organizations, customers can leverage existing investments and accelerate value gains in their business as they develop composite solutions that differentiate themselves in the marketplace. SAP's offerings address the full lifecycle of an SOA strategy to best position the project for success.

Professional services from SAP Consulting include:

• Advisory and Value Services
• Design and Development Governance
• Enabling and Implementation Services
• SAP Custom Development
• SAP Education

"Over the last few years, we have seen SOA move from a concept to reality with customers, due in large part to the comprehensive set of offerings from SAP," said Bernd-Michael Rumpf, global head of Field Services, SAP AG. "Complementing the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, SAP's tools, applications, services and a robust ecosystem of partners enable customers to develop a sound SOA strategy and execute on it. With additional ways of enablement like the enterprise SOA starter kit or the methodology for accelerated transformation, as well as comprehensive support offerings that have been developed over the last year, customers can more rapidly and easily derive business benefits like greater flexibility in our rapidly changing global business environments."