SAP on Thursday unveiled strategies and technologies designed to let enterprise applications exploit the power of Web services.

The Enterprise Services Architecture is a services-based blueprint for businesses that lets modular, flexible applications communicate with each other using open standards and Web-based technologies. "ESA explains how [business processes] use a platform to engage all the systems that an enterprise has," says Peter Graf, SAP's VP of market strategy. "It's the blueprint of all SAP solutions going forward."

SAP also disclosed the release of a new application-integration platform, NetWeaver, which will let users create applications that work like Web services. SAP will begin shipping NetWeaver today and will also make it available to customers as part of its online mySAP product.

"We see [this] as at least as significant as the announcement of client-server architectures 10 years ago," Graf says. In the 1970s, he explains, companies worked with a very centralized computer system, based on mainframes. In the 1990s, they moved to a client-server model. Now, Graf says, the business world is "at a similar inflection point" as when the shift to client-server occurred. "There are a lot of business needs today that can be answered by applying technology like Web services," he says. "There's a new set of business processes working that go across the board, and in order to make those processes work, you need to have a new platform, and that's Web services."