Is SAP NetWeaver ESA a wise choice?
(Slide #23) Although SAP’s current SOA activities around XI are behind the competition we assume that it will be the technology leader by 2009. The SAP Exchange Infrastructure (XI) is currently a middleware tool like many others. Compared to the technology leaders it is not too thrilling and if you needed a simple mapping and workflow tool XI would probably not be the leading edge. But it appears that while the lions are asleep SAP is planning the big bang. XI today (Slide #24) Today, SAP XI is still an ordinary middleware that needs to defend its place against strong specialized players like TIBCO, IBM (Datastage TX/Mercator, WBI, Notes etc.), Microsoft BIZTALK, SUN SeeBeyond, Seeburger, Fiorano, MantaRay, VSB (Very Simple Bus) and a good hundred of others. XI is a heavily developing and changing system. The hybrid concept between ABAP and J2EE is not a plus for XI — wouldn’t it require skills in both worlds? The design and mapping tools are definitely not state-of-the-art compared t
