It has been some time since my last blog on SDN , more than a year ago. It has been an exciting and challenging year with many changes (which is always good since it is never boring) and developments. My main focus in the last year was to work with Global SI Partners to enable them on enterprise SOA. All the enablement activities were done as part of Global eSOA Partner Enablement Program which I am going to explain in more details in this article. You and your partners can still benefit by following our approach and guidelines even if you are not part of the program yet.

Background

Many partners begin to realize that a large demand for Platform exists and they want and need to participate in the market growth to increase their margins and be part of Business Network Transformation. Those who have already realized that SOA can bring new opportunities, still struggle to bring the concept into the real life and keep asking: “Where to start and how to develop the right skills ?”. It is currently estimated that a significant gap exists in the SAP ecosystem, with the shortage at anywhere over 30,000 professionals.

After learning the gaps and partner requirement when it comes to Enterprise SOA and BPP adoption, we realized partners need someone to work with on the practical approach to Enterprise SOA , someone to provide practical and immediate guidance on how to start enterprise SOA projects, provide fast results that can be extended in the future ,identify and present industry specific enterprise SOA scenarios , provide out of the box Enterprise SOA solutions and offer professional services to their customers.

Overview 

The enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) partner enablement program was launched by Field Services (FS) to the selected SI Partners in 2007, in collaboration with global partner management (GPM) and the Office of the CTO in the EMEA. The Program has seen great success in 2007 and it was decided to offer it to other SI Partners in 2008 as well. Global roll-out of the programn started in Q1 2008 and in the last few months we have almost 50% of the Global SI Partners committed to the program , enabled more than 250 consultants / architects , participated in more than 15 enterprise SOA events and much more ....

With SAP Partner Enablement Program we offer to:

• Enable selected strategic SI Partners to deliver on enterprise SOA - Engage effectively with SAP major service partners to improve on strategy, business and technical execution for the benefit of both organizations. Evangelizing enterprise SOA and Business Process Platform to the partner community

• Develop and roll out knowledge and services through the enablement framework - Developing and delivering a comprehensive enterprise SOA partner enablement framework based on the SAP Field and partners experience.

• Support partners create enterprise SOA awareness resulting in projects - Coach and support partners to develop compelling enterprise SOA practices and assets (Composite Applications , Business Processes and Profesional services based on enterprise SOA principles)

• Orchestrate fragmented partner related activities around enterprise SOA adoption - Work closely with global, regional and local SAP partner management as well as with other teams in SAP to create and deliver content to the partners.

enterprise SOA Partner Enablement Framework

A comprehensive enterprise SOA Partner Enablement Framework has been developed in the last few months. The framework represented in form of a tool combining all the services overview , content and guidelines for effective enterprise SOA Adoption by SI Partners. The framework based on the best practices from SAP Field and implementations of real life SOA scenarios.

The partner enablement framework includes :

1. Concept - Methodology approach for enabling the partner and develop compelling enterprise SOA practices
2. Content - Provide content addressing different audiences in partner organization. Deliver workshops/sessions for developing the right skills and address partner specific requirement.
3. Services - Extensive offering for supporting partner in different strategic activities around enterprise SOA , support in customer related projects, architecture review , support in join events etc ... .

The framework would be available for SAP Consultants and Architects first and would be gradually shared with the partners during the enablement phase. One of the main objectives of the program is making sure that partners can scale out internally and disseminate the knowledge  and experience inside their organization this is why we would share all the content with the partners in order to make sure that they have all the tools required for eSOA adoption when talking to their customers and internally.

Stay tuned , in the next few articles I am going to describe in more details about the concept , content and services that we offer and how we do it....