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March 28, 2002

Expert Panel: The Future of Enterprise Applications

The growing importance of Web services is just one major development our experts see on the enterprise app horizon

Long Arm of the Enterprise

Debashish Bhattacharjee
Management consultant, PricewaterhouseCoopers

The most significant new developments in technology for the intelligent enterprise continue to be the development of products that enhance the organization's Internet, intranet, and extranet capabilities. Despite the B2C and B2B fallout, they remain conceptually sound strategies when executed with sound business fundamentals.

Infrastructure-enabling technologies continue to lead the charge toward a distributed global architecture for the international corporation. Akamai Technologies Inc., Inktomi Corp., and Digital Island offer solutions that let you build massively scalable "edge" networks that can be deployed across the globe. Global load-balancing solutions from Foundry and F5 enable packet-filtering and monitoring, and "shaping" products from Packeteer enable corporate networks to manage bandwidth more effectively.

Two important application frameworks promise to deliver enterprise applications that are interconnected, open, and cost effective: .Net from Microsoft and the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification from Sun Microsystems. The .Net framework promises open and cost-effective integration among disparate applications with its implementation of Web services. J2EE has become a robust platform for enterprise applications, and by virtue of its portability and rich APIs, it demonstrates great potential as the platform of choice for scalable enterprise applications.

Both application frameworks embrace XML, which continues to mature, but will not be complete until standards are resolved and consolidated for industry-, business-, and presentation-layer XML frameworks.

Guided by Voices

Joshua Greenbaum
Principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting

The next revolution in enterprise applications will come from the blending of two technologies that, while promising, still have a way to go in order to prove their ultimate worth. But when these two technologies reach an appropriate level of technical maturity, enterprise software will enter a new and very exciting phase.

These two technologies are voice recognition and wireless communications, respectively. The wireless revolution, in my opinion, is less about advanced standards such as 3G and Bluetooth and more about ubiquity. Maybe it's best to talk about the wireless enterprise, where a wireless LAN forms the infrastructure for an enterprise that routinely sends and receives data without the need for physical connectivity. This lack of a physical anchor to data communications will drive tremendous innovation and flexibility along a vast continuum of business processes.

Voice recognition is another revolution in the making, in part fueled by wireless ubiquity. Accessing information by using voice commands will increase efficiency and productivity in myriad ways across the enterprise, particularly as users seek to interface with the corporate information infrastructure using devices that don't possess a standard QWERTY keyboard. Once voice recognition is married to wireless ubiquity, enterprise software, and the enterprise, will never be the same.

The Center Can't Hold

Rod Johnson
Vice President, AMR Labs, AMR Research

The current enterprise application model is becoming obsolete. Each application was designed to stand alone, with the goal of being the center of its users' universe. Thus, nearly all enterprise applications were built from the ground up with proprietary tools, languages, application servers, and integration frameworks.

These applications were built in a different era and on a technology stack that fails to address the realities of a multivendor world. As we have moved into the era of the Internet, vendors have raced to eliminate the business logic and code on the client in support of a browser-based user interface. However, just like the screen-scraping technology at the front end of the client/server era, user interface Band-Aids do not address the fundamental problems of how enterprise applications are built. Furthermore, they do nothing to address the problems users face, such as the cost of integration, achieving integration, managing change, data integrity, and poor reporting.

Industry-standard technology is emerging, which — if widely adopted by application vendors — will let users address many of the costs of maintaining current environments. The most significant change is the maturation of commercial application servers, based on J2EE or Microsoft .Net Application servers. The move to Web services should change the way applications are built, bought, and deployed, including the componentization of the currently monolithic enterprise application stacks. To support the real environment that exists in most businesses, vendors must design their applications to operate on data they do not own, through a presentation tier they did not design, and most of all, to run on an application server they didn't build.

Like all previous technology upheavals, there will be winners and losers. Today, enterprise application vendors — such as SAP, PeopleSoft, or Siebel Systems Inc. — are the only vendors accustomed to taking responsibility for software maintenance, hotline support, and technology infrastructure. However, significant investments will be required in order to secure their positions: They will have to demonstrate that their architectures and use of industry-standard technology facilitate the inclusion and integration of applications and data from other vendors.