Packaged Enterprise Software: Wedding bells or Death knell?
Very often, the intensity of media and analyst coverage of the advancements in technology overwhelm many of us. The recent hype surrounding SOA, BPM, Web 2.0, and open source has fuelled speculation that shrink-wrap enterprise applications will become irrelevant in the wake of technology evolution. Technology pundits say that the emergence of new business models and technology paradigms are forcing a shift from inflexible and stove-piped applications with ever-escalating total-cost-of-ownership and poor user experience.
The confluence of these factors combine together in form of a ‘perfect storm’ – an opportunity to herald enterprises into an era of just-in-time software development and do-it-yourself (D-I-Y) IT architecture, that adapts itself to the new and changing business requirements.
The choice to build atomic applications based on a plug-n-play architecture makes it easy for enterprises to meet ever evolving business needs. The phenomenon to ‘build’ is likely to sustain as application development gradually assumes a new meaning due to the emergence of new technologies and tools like BPM, AJAX, etc. Re-usability of code enabled by SOA promises to improve developer productivity and improve time-to-market. Process modeling and orchestration tools allow business users to write new applications without using programming languages. For the first time in the history of enterprise computing, it is possible to effortlessly fuse two disparate applications to develop a composite application – a point solution that addresses niche functionality. New technologies and open standards allow applications to interoperate in loosely coupled mode. The result will be a highly interoperable IT infrastructure that allows enterprise to plug-and-play best-of-breed sub-atomic applications. The option to ‘build’ process-centric applications in turn, will force enterprises to transform their ERP-centric IT landscape into an integrated IT infrastructure that fosters cross-enterprise process collaboration. Migration and maintenance of such applications will be not only quick, but will also consume fewer resources.
What does this mean for the future of packaged enterprise applications? Does it mean an end of the era of packaged applications? Would enterprises stop buying huge monolithic applications and start building applications themselves? As always, the truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes. Most world-class companies will like to leverage their IT investments and continue to use custom-off-the-shelf applications for their standard requirements. However, they would also build their easily configurable process-relevant applications to support their unique business needs. What does this mean? The packaged applications would co-exist with custom-built applications to form a closely-knit ecosystem in which enterprise applications would become the building blocks of service-oriented business applications (SOBA). So, it would be no more ‘build v/s buy’; rather it would be ‘build-as-well-as-buy’.
Similar to the various forms of life on our planet that constantly adapt to the environment they live in, I believe that packaged application vendors as well as professional services providers too would start adapting to the imminent change. Most enterprise application vendors have already begun to move away for proprietary standards to embrace open standards. Almost all leading enterprise application vendors are focusing on the development of composite application framework or the SOA-BPM platform. Professional service providers follow suit and have started developing competencies in the new-generation tools and technologies. Service delivery models will become more flexible, giving enterprises the flexibility of choosing the way they want to use software. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model would change the entire dynamics of the traditional software license based model., rapid adoption, reduced risks, risk free upgrades and no burden of large upfront costs, would further increase the popularity of SaaS model among both small and large enterprises.
To conclude, ‘wedding bells’ will ring for those who are the most responsive to change – while surely ‘death knell’ will ring loudly for those who would remain either mired in status-quo or are slow to adapt.
As the history of evolution shows us, those who do not change will be history, rather than create it. To emphasize my point, I would like to quote noted scientist, Charles Darwin who says, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
i have read your article Really Nice one.because Now a days not only big companies like Adobe, Microsoft are doing software and product development in India at their development center. But now many other small to medium scale
companies have started software and product development and started entering into outsourcing software product development. It is considered that, increase in business will be around 100% in offshore outsourcing product
development.
Posted by: joomla application development india | Jan 25, 2010 at 02:30 PM