An application for every occasion

Popular theory says the packaged enterprise applications business has been in a tailspin for some time. It postulates that most CRM implementations fail, best-of-breed is too complicated and/or expensive, the hosted model is the future, and the list goes on.

The other popular line of thought is that you can avoid all this mess, take a number, get in line, and a systems integrator will be with you shortly. Oh, and please check your brain at the door — you won’t need that anymore.

In reality, companies such as SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and now Commerce One have for years been undertaking the massive task of re-engineering their applications to survive in a networked software world.

They realized long ago that it’s no longer enough to grab a magic bag full of XML Web services tricks, expose your applications as components through standards-based APIs, and proclaim yourself a hip corporate citizen.

Yet only now are we starting to see evidence of the real reason for re-engineering delivery on the promise of networked computing.

In the case of Commerce One’s Conductor, the platform represents in part the intersection of application integration and networking, a theme that the application development community has long talked about.

As Phil Windley, the former CIO of the state of Utah observes, application integration platforms such as Conductor take a network-centric rather than application-centric view of applications.

There are essentially two approaches to applications taking a network-centric view. One is where a portal-style interface runs on any computing hardware device and makes SOAP calls to access application components that reside on the network or Internet. A rudimentary form of this, for example, might be a stock quote service plugged into your portal.

The other example says that a traditional enterprise application, such as CRM, is in fact its own self-governing Web service that sits on the network and is available for use by other applications without necessarily relying on a direct connection to you, the user, to justify its existence. Many companies are exposing APIs to their apps for this very reason.

The benefit for enterprises in either case is that the influence of a network-centric approach to application design ultimately would allow an increasing number of applications to work in whatever fashion your business process dictates. In a rapidly changing economy where a company’s ability to adapt quickly is critical, this can be extremely valuable.

Application integration platforms can give you this flexibility by allowing a business analyst to easily map out or modify an application’s workflow so that it’s uniquely tailored to the company.

Looking ahead, the next step is to work with networking vendors to make these platforms operate more efficiently in the enterprise through deeper support across the seven layers of the OSI network stack.

Ultimately, the value for enterprises is no longer all about making sure you have the right application suite. A company’s competitive differentiation is its ability to make any application adapt to suit its needs.