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January 1, 2004

A Year in Perspective

A look back at the news of 2003 and a projection of trends in 2004

A pattern pops out when you examine the big news items from 2003: It's mostly about putting things together. Mergers. Application integration. Grid computing. These and other trends inherently have to do with finding affinities and creating a whole that's worth more than the sum of its parts. Here are the dozen trends we identified this year as the most influential for intelligent enterprises.

1. BI Consolidation

Acquisition activity for the BI sector seemed near-constant at times in 2003, with such mergers as Business Objects and Crystal Decisions, Hyperion and Brio, Actuate and Nimble, Ascential and Mercator, and Informatica and Striva. The BI industry in 2004 still has the urge to merge, drawn toward the creation of single-vendor full BI stacks.

2. Thinking Outside the Batch

Data integration is evolving. While extract, transform, and load (ETL) vendors were finding ways to make the batch process faster and more frequent, startups such as MetaMatrix and Nimble were executing a run-around. Enterprise information integration creates a unified view of data in real time. Of course, it doesn't replace ETL in many circumstances. But where it does, it's a welcome option.

3. SOA ASAP

The development of Web services has finally broken open the dam for the service-oriented architecture (SOA). Many Fortune 2000 companies are planning to implement an SOA within the next 12 months.

4. Web Services Orientation

XML and Web services finally enabled the SOA to flourish, but have spawned a new problem that's only getting worse: latency of applications and network overhead can rise exponentially with the number of disparate Web services composing an app. A slew of products and standards emerged in 2003, but there is still much to be done.

5. One With the Customer

Customer data integration — aggregating data from multiple source systems without the rigidity and cost associated with building real-time data warehouses — is quickly gaining ground among large customer-facing corporations.

6. Open Adoption

With analysts agreeing that the major database vendors are trying to sell functions and features that most customers will never use, open source databases, such as MySQL, are becoming more attractive to enterprises interested in a scalable, reliable, and robust system for a low cost. Solution providers are paying attention to this growing need for intelligent infrastructure, with companies such as Network Appliance and webMethods partnering with BI vendors to bring new abilities to their solutions, such as storage analytics and business activity monitoring, that can help companies realize the full potential of their resources.

7. Read the Contract

The growing prevalence of business process outsourcing, increasingly heterogeneous contract terms, and the strictures of Sarbanes-Oxley are behind the growing adoption of contract management among large enterprises, most of which don't even know where their contracts currently are.

8. Grid and Utility Computing

Doing more with less hardware is what grid and utility computing are about. While the ideal state is far from achieved, individual vendors are making their products able to use otherwise idle computing resources. Oracle 10g and Informatica's SuperGlue are some prominent examples.

9. Bioinformatics Starts With BI

With the terabytes of data generated from genome, drug, and agricultural research reaching new levels, life science and pharmaceutical companies are frequently turning to business intelligence companies for help deriving actionable intelligence. Bioinformatics is a large and growing consumer of BI.

10. Healthcare Integration

The healthcare vertical has become a big consumer of enterprise integration, business process management, and business rules management software. Blame the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). And thank HIPAA. Not only is it helping IT vendors survive, it's helping your doctors and pharmacists treat you better.

11. Applying IT to IT

As business managers have looked around for costs to cut, CIOs have noticed a threatening glance or two thrown their direction. So they've applied their skills to proving their worth. Project portfolio management, process optimization, the new Data Center Markup Language variant of XML, and performance management are among the techniques and technologies IT managers are using to tighten operations and quantify their value.

12. Product Innovation

With several years of cost cutting across the board, many companies will find that the only way to stay alive now is to actually offer new, innovative products and services. In some cases, intelligence and integration may be what's for sale: A national mobile windshield replacement company has EDI-like data integration with insurance companies — and it sends installers out with the right glue, based partly on real-time weather updates.

— Jeanette Burriesci & Michelle M. Young