Introduction to SAP NetWeaver

Overview

SAP NetWeaver is an integrated application platform developed based on professional standards. It remarkably simplifies system integration. As shown in Figure 1, components contained in SAP NetWeaver include the portal, application servers, business intelligence (BI) solution, and system and data integration technologies.

SAP NetWeaver can help enterprises integrate personnel, information, and service processes by crossing the boundaries of technologies and organizations. Additionally, SAP NetWeaver fully interacts with IBM Web Sphere (J2EE) and provides customers with flexible infrastructure management, simplifies system complexity, and reduces the total costs.

Figure 1 Components contained in SAP NetWeaver

SAP NetWeaver Application Scenarios

SAP NetWeaver applies to the following scenarios:

Personnel integration
SAP NetWeaver integrates the existing management, office, and document systems into the enterprise information portal to provide a unified portal for the enterprise IT system.
Information integration
SAP NetWeaver integrates the management information stored in databases and unstructured information (including market information and reports) scattered in different departments in an enterprise to build an information warehouse and knowledge management system to support operation decision-making.
Process integration
SAP NetWeaver consolidates service processes in different systems to build an automatic process. Only a set of system is presented to users.
Platform integration
SAP NetWeaver provides underlying architecture that supports open standards, such as xml, and can flexibly connect to other systems.