Enterprise SOA goes beyond the fundamentals of a serviceoriented architecture (SOA). SOA is a distributed software model that uses independent Web services to support business processes, but the enterprise SOA approach - as defined by SAP and its partners and customers - elevates the design, composition, and management of Web services through the use of enterprise services.

This white paper describes enterprise SOA and the business opportunities it creates for manufacturers. To clarify this concept, we begin by describing the parallel paths followed by software and electronics developers into the new era of plug and play.