Packaged Composite Applications (O'Reilly Field Guide to Enterprise Software)

Today's corporate computing environment is too often characterized by silos of data in enterprise applications like ERP, CRM, and supply chain management. Integrating these applications involves hardwiring connections between them, often resulting in a rigid and inefficient IT infrastructure.Packaged Composite Applications (PCAs) are an innovative answer to this dysfunctional scenario. Originated by SAP, one of the worlds foremost technology companies, PCAs represent a new architectural paradigm for enterprise computing. Using web services, they combine new functionality with services from existing applications to enable flexible, cross-functional automation. But is this new model right for your business? That's where this book comes in.Packaged Composite Applications is the result of a systematic search through the brain trust of SAP for all of the relevant arguments, examples, concepts, and analogies related to Packaged Composite Applications. This book is not a marketing treatise about neatly-shaped colored boxes. It is not a backward-looking, outdated description of a product without context. This book, rather, combines the approach of a forward-looking analyst with the perspective of an executive who must make things work, without skimping on the relevant technical details. The author examines the ideas driving PCAs forward in the marketplace and the problems and solutions that an executive and technologist will encounter in implementation. The result is an authoritative text that allows all interested parties to assess the value of PCAs for their lives as executives, technologists, analysts, sales representatives, and users.