The market place for enterprise applications such as ERP, Content Management, Business Intelligence, CRM, etc. has changed significantly over recent years and is in the process of undergoing even more change with the emergence of Cloud Based applications to serve the need for Enterprise Information. So what are the implications for traditional client-server applications and for legacy systems across this market place.
Less than 5 years ago it was unusual to see applications running in any other environment than on an internally hosted server with Local or Wide Area networks providing user access. This was always a challenge for businesses that had disparate information or dispersed office structures, whether that was National or International.
There are now a significant number of Software Technology businesses emerging that deliver solutions to this problem by hosting the Enterprise applications on either remote servers or on virtual servers within “The Cloud” and creating the applications in a web environment to make them accessible Globally.
This has been a strategic breakthrough for a veritable army of Application Developers to provide on-demand applications on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis making these applications very affordable to businesses, an important factor during the current challenging financial climate.
Taking this a step further, there are specialists that can provide completely bespoke or heavily tailored solutions within the price range and time scale of typical traditional applications.
EMC, recently acquired a company called Archer Technologies that provide a range of on-demand solutions within the Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) sector. This brings a very flexible offering to EMC’s portfolio to complement their traditional Enterprise Data Management product set such as Documentum.
Other emerging organisations such as Factonomy based in East Lothian provide a similar range of solutions within the Business Continuity Management (BCM) arena that are Cloud-friendly, web centric applications developed within a very powerful framework with a Declarative XML based process engine at the heart of it. Factonomy’s proposition is attracting a great deal of interest within information hungry sectors including Banking & Insurance, Aerospace, Telecommunications, Legal, and Public Sector Authorities as well as gaining the attention of the market research companies such as Gartner, Forrester etc. that are watching their progress.
Whilst being interesting from a trends point of view, the installed base of legacy systems still demand a significant level of investment to keep them current as the cost and time overhead of porting such valuable strategic information onto a new platform can be very prohibitive.
Future development is therefore very clear on the need to make good use of existing information by utilising such data access technologies as REST and SOA.
So the future for enterprise applications within the Cloud is bright, and does not necessarily mean having to put legacy systems in the shade.
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