Enterprise Applications: Act Two
It's difficult to say whether it's pragmatism or jaded resignation, but this year's InformationWeek Analytics/Intelligent Enterprise 2010 Enterprise Applications Survey reveals that enterprises aren't entirely happy with conventional enterprise applications--or any of the alternatives for that matter.
ERP, CRM and supply-chain management systems are still costly and difficult to implement, according to the 485 business technology professionals who responded to the survey. What's more, they doubt that next-generation applications will be any easier to handle. As for the alternatives, most enterprises have yet to fully embrace services-oriented architecture, software as a services or business process management. Oh sure, they're using these technologies here and there, but few survey respondents are confident that SOA, SaaS or BPM can handle everything.
What's clear is that they're likely to combine software and services. Whether that's on-premises services or cloud-based apps and services will depend on the sophistication and security concerns of the individual enterprise. The economy has put a damper on SOA fervor, with interest cooling in elaborate, internal composite application development initiatives. The focus has shifted to using SOA to integrate, customize and extend existing components, particularly vendor-supplied applications.
There's plenty of growth in the use of SaaS and cloud computing, but mainly for e-mail, collaboration and CRM. Mission-critical apps like ERP are seeing slower growth, and our research reveals that many organizations aren't ready to put sensitive financial records and transactional data in the cloud.
Finally, our readers expressed keen interest in BPM. It promises user-friendly, model-driven application development, business-IT collaboration (around those models) and the kind of flexibility and adaptability that on-premises applications haven't delivered. But the surprise in our research is just how keen respondents are to get BPM tools and capabilities from their existing applications vendors.
The next act has yet to be written, but it looks like conventional enterprise applications--love 'em or hate 'em--will continue to play a lead role at most businesses. SOA, SaaS, BPM and other alternatives will play supporting roles.
Table of Contents
5 Author's Bio
6 Executive Summary
8 Research Synopsis
9 Enterprise Applications: The Drama Continues
11 Pain Remains with Conventional Apps
18 SaaS Bolsters Enterprise Diversity
24 BPM Becomes a Feature Set
28 Path Forward: Business-IT Collaboration
32 Know Your Business Process Management Technologies
33 Appendix
Figure List
9 Figure 1: Responsibilities for Enterprise Applications
10 Figure 2: Primary Vendor for On-Premises Enterprise Applications
11 Figure 3: Organizational Attitude Toward Performance Management
12 Figure 4: Responsibility for Performance Management
13 Figure 5: Barriers to Success
14 Figure 6: Most Time-Consuming Tasks
15 Figure 7: Organizational View on Next-Generation Application Platforms
16 Figure 8: Satisfaction with Elements of On-Premises Enterprise Applications
17 Figure 9: Likelihood to Invest in Enterprise Applications
18 Figure 10: Organizational View on Enterprise Applications
19 Figure 11: Likelihood to Invest in Performance Management Technologies
20 Figure 12: Likelihood to Invest in SaaS-Based Enterprise Applications
21 Figure 13: Likelihood to Invest in SaaS-Based Performance Management Applications
22 Figure 14: Responsibility for Managing Business Processes
24 Figure 15: Adoption of Emerging and Alternative Approaches and Technologies
26 Figure 16: Organizational Attitude Towards BPM
27 Figure 17: Preferred Source for BPM Technologies
28 Figure 18: Likelihood to Invest in Process Management Technologies
29 Figure 19: Primary Business Priority
30 Figure 20: Productivity Improvements for Technology Initiatives
33 Figure 21: Industry
34 Figure 22: Job Title
35 Figure 23: Company Size
36 Figure 24: Company Revenue
About the Author
Doug Henschen is executive editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, analytics and big data analysis. He previously served as editor in chief of Intelligent Enterprise and has covered IT and data-driven marketing for the last 14 years of his 29-year career in publishing.
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