Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) Vs Service-oriented Architecture (SOA)

Service-Oriented Architecture has been around for a little while and its implementation across industries is still being examined, such as in the banking and financial services sector. SOA is a term that pertains to underlying support structure of communication among various work units that are commonly referred as ‘Services’. These services carry out small functions, such as producing data, validating a customer, providing simple analytical services, among others.

In Service-oriented Architecture, SOA, there is a producer or provider, and also a consumer. The two are separated by a virtual bridge which is the network. The provider and consumer communicate using the bridge. The prime attention is how two parties interact with each other to service the customer.

The principles of SOA require that the services should:

• Have behaviour that is clearly defined by a published interface contract
• Have network addressable interfaces or endpoints.
• Be dynamically discoverable and usable.
• Emphasize interoperability.

One success factor for SOA is providing well-defined contracts with which other systems or applications can interact and significantly decreases the dependency on coding by eliminating the need to know and write to APIs.

The Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) on the other hand, is SAP’s enhanced version of the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). The function of ESA is to deploy web-based services at the enterprise level.

It streamlines the process of idea generation and its subsequent development of innovative application-based programs within the existing infrastructure while minimizing the cost and allowing timely implementation of new business processes.

ESA is based on an architectural pattern using which multiple applications, components and even systems can communicate with each other in accordance with the SOA principles. The limelight is mostly on heterogeneous applications that interact with each other and achieve a common business objective.

The ESA also allows communication with API which is a great way to develop services and form an interdependent reliable network. To put it in simpler terms, the Enterprise Services Architecture is a message carrier that performs protocol conversion, message format transformation from numerous services and applications all of which link to ESA.

Enterprise services using ESA and SOA are better understood by experts at JK Tech, who carefully analyse the producer and consumer behaviour.