Expert Panel: The Future of Enterprise ApplicationsThe growing importance of Web services is just one major development our experts see on the enterprise app horizonContinued from Page 1 Taking IT on the RoadMichael Martin Charles Darwin once said, "Change or risk being left behind." Never has a statement carried such weight as we look to the future of enterprise applications. Today, companies are doing less in-house, and more outsourcing. Companies can no longer afford to launch a project that takes more than 18 months to go live. In order to survive in today's competitive landscape, IT departments need to quickly affect the bottom line. The most effective way to do this is by using enterprise applications that have added functionality and tighter integration with other solutions. We are moving toward a market where enterprise applications will yield less customization and more out-of-the-box functionality. To accomplish this goal, vendors will begin to assemble panels of industry experts to help with product road mapping, an endeavor that should improve customer satisfaction by a large percentage. Major ERP providers will continue their quest to enable companies to communicate and collaborate across their extended enterprise. A major change in strategy is ahead, however, as these companies will now look to make each of their individual modules compete with the best-of-breed software for that particular module. In some cases, this will be done the old-fashioned way, with an "if you can't beat them, buy them" mentality. In other cases, companies will put more energy into developing the capabilities in-house. A piece of the enterprise applications future that can't be ignored is implementation strategy. Projects previously requiring a large system integration team will be reorganized to eliminate situations where eight people are billing and three people are actually doing the work. Companies will focus on what is necessary to accomplish their overarching business needs before they consider what type of technology to use. Likewise, integrators will begin to work more closely with the software providers to develop a more cost-effective, "process before technology" approach to projects — adding immediate value by addressing key pain points for the least cost, with the shortest implementation timeframe. As 2002 is underway, one thing is clear: Enterprise application providers need to recognize the challenges that lie ahead and take steps to change their business processes accordingly. Otherwise, they risk being left behind. Pieces of a WholeRam Reddy What is an enterprise application? The easy answer is an ERP or supply chain management-type packaged application used to run an enterprise's front- or back-office functions. But what about legacy systems developed in environments such as CICS or Cobol used to run an enterprise's business? As history has demonstrated, in-house developed legacy enterprise systems will continue to exist for many decades to come. Therefore, it is necessary to include custom legacy enterprise applications in an analysis of what the future holds for enterprise application technologies. In the past decade, many companies have invested millions of dollars in implementing packaged enterprise applications and been disappointed. The primary difficulty lies with the scope of implementing a multiyear enterprise system that calls for a coordinated change across many functional areas within the company. Not only do these new systems have to cope with organizational and cultural resistance to change — causing cost overruns — they also often replace legacy system functionality that provides great competitive advantage. For example, imagine that a green-screen custom legacy application that provided all the information needed for accounts receivable (A/R) clerks to perform their jobs was being replaced by a GUI enterprise package application. To do the same job using the new software may require clerks to navigate 14 different screens, whereas in the legacy system, all the necessary information was available from one screen. Clearly, the off-the-shelf A/R function of the integrated enterprise application could never match the operational efficiency of the custom-built, green-screen legacy application. A few integrated enterprise application vendors that recognize the continuing role of legacy systems have responded by breaking integrated applications into modules. This approach lets customers quickly select and implement the needed module. Thus, the most significant enterprise technology developments are middleware and enterprise portal technologies that couple these modules with legacy systems. These integration technologies will be the foundation for a new breed of modular, but linked, enterprise applications. Components of this new enterprise application will be small and be quickly developed, integrating legacy and packaged enterprise applications internally and across the supply chain. Faster, SmarterH. Lynn Ryan Evolving from transaction-based, data specific systems models to information-rich decision-support systems is one of the most important and strategic directions owners of enterprise applications can make. Systems automation functions that increase productivity; provide access to information; and process, edit, summarize, and report transactions are standards that have transformed business. However, the competitiveness of the new global economy requires immediate decision capability, and each business has unique information: It may be in the form of specific industry knowledge, products, inventories, risk and internal controls, revenue and operating expense metrics, and other relevant factors. Thus, it is not sufficient to apply systematic rules to these conditions alone. New YardsticksColin White I see three key technology trends in the enterprise application industry: packaged solutions for faster application deployment, improved application integration, and automated business decision-making. In the first category, one obvious direction has been toward the use of packaged solutions. In choosing a packaged application, however, companies still face the dilemma of using either an end-to-end solution from a single vendor or buying and integrating multiple best-of-breed products. For companies that have the IT resources, the preference is still the integration of multiple packages. But the end-to-end solution from companies such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP is gaining traction with companies that simply don't have the resources or skills for integration projects. Although many organizations are using packaged solutions, it is still difficult for them to avoid the need to integrate these packages with legacy systems and those of key trading partners. The industry direction here is toward employing Web services for both intra- and interenterprise application integration. Although there is no question that Web services are an important integration technology, it will still take some time for this technology to mature. Early adopters will be faced with evolving standards, product incompatibilities, and performance issues. A third area of development is the provision of actionable business metrics that enable automated decision-making. New solutions here focus on integrating business intelligence applications into day-to-day enterprise operations. These solutions also deliver business metrics to decision engines that apply the metrics to business rules, and then send appropriate XML-based action messages back to operational and e-business applications. You can also integrate these new business intelligence (BI) applications into corporate systems using an enterprise portal. The bottom line here is that BI is now being embedded into day-to-day business operations to support not only an integrated enterprise system but also an intelligent one. Get on the BusStewart McKie In the world of enterprise applications, the pendulum swings between monolithic suites and best-of-breed solutions. Do you go for single-vendor, tightly integrated suites with broad functionality or combinations of products whose deeper functionality is offset by the burden of tying them together? Soon it won't matter as enterprise application vendors begin to base their offerings on true "information buses" that assume functionality will come not just from the vendor's own modules and third-party add-on modules but also from the emerging world of Web services. This technology will put the focus back where it belongs: on assembling the best possible functional solution to automate a specific business process. This is the real meaning of "loosely coupled" from a business perspective: products and services assembled to suit the needs of business process automation. Web services add an important dimension to this scenario. Snapping best-of-breed product add-ons in and out of enterprise applications is not for the fainthearted. But snapping out one Web service for another within the context of a specific business process will prove to be an easier matter, giving businesses the agility they need. An information bus that is Web services-aware is not the only technology needed to restore best-of-breed to prominence. Vendors also need to make it easier to find, subscribe to, and administer the Web services that can be used in business process automation. But Web-based broker hubs that offer process-specific Web services for consumption by private application-user communities will soon take care of that. Make no mistake: best of breed is back, but this time it's based on a "snap-in" service rather than an "add-on" product paradigm.
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