Take back ownership of architecture
Lay out a strategy to take back ownership of enterprise architecture.

 

 

 

Don’t “Buy an application, inherit an architecture”. Increases in componentry and openness in packaged application architecture belies a megavendor agenda for greater architecture ownership and customer lock-in. 

Packaged applications have always come with "baggage." For years the advantage has been, "buy an application, inherit an architecture." That advantage remains true. Even with an increase in openness, service-oriented architectures, exposed integration layers and metadata, mega-application vendors use architecture for account control and increased "wallet share

New Enterprise Architecture. The Itera Consulting Group’s new enterprise architecture emphasizes planning for a heterogeneous portfolio of applications and technologies. Enterprises evaluating packaged applications should consider if and when the vendor’s technology matches enterprise objectives. In doing so, enterprises will take back the ownership of architecture.

 

Applications are changing their architectures from closed, monolithic and merely Web-aware to “open,” componentized and Web-services based. As this overhaul proceeds, enterprises will have to spend substantially more to upgrade to these new architectures.

 

Through 2008, according to Gartner’s research, business agility and real-time enterprise processes will require use of service-oriented and event-driven software architectures (0.9 probability).

 

Always Connected. We believe that the confluence of secure broadband wireless, low-power mobile devices, real-time infrastructures and service-orientated architectures will be the catalyst for the next major wave of IT.

 

The next-generation wireless networks (Full 3G) will deliver sufficient bandwidth to users anywhere to satisfactorily deliver all business application — users will be always connected, enabling true mobility. Faster communications and decisions support, or business intelligence, provide competitive differentiation through improved reaction time to market and customer events.

 

Applications as Business Services.  In the future, when companies buy a service, their applications will “live” externally and will be managed by the company that provides the service.

 

Buyers will no longer have an application perspective of what they are buying, but rather a business service view. Many users will no longer have an understanding of, or interest in, the actual application that is used to provide a service.

 

This is analogous to the state of the telephone — 99.9 percent of people who use the telephone have no interest in which applications make the service available. Likewise, companies or consumers do not think that of their telephone services as “outsourcing” their telephony needs.
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