When you consider the software we've selected for this year's awards in the Business Applications area, a theme will likely jump out at you. The Web and the Internet dominate this space to such a degree that if you don't play on the Internet, you aren't a player.
The faster we go, the more behind we get. Professor Irwin Corey said, "If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." But many would agree that the constant change of direction thrust upon us by rapid developments in the industry leave us feeling as though we may never end up where we're going. The most far-reaching changes proposed for the software industry this year were Microsoft's and Sun Microsystems' visions of the future of distributed Web-based applications. Microsoft's .Net and Sun's ONE (Open Network Environment) strategies will drive us toward developing and deploying Web applications comprising a number of discrete Web services. Some of these services will be created in-house, but many will be pieces that are rented or purchased on a transaction-by-transaction basis from service providers. The big difference between these visions is the place Java holds: central for one company (we'll give you one guess) and peripheral at best for the other.
No matter which vision you embrace, the interface will most likely be based on the browser, and applications will use more standards-based technologies than before. Thanks to careful oversight by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), browser standards such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), DOM (Document Object Model) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) have matured to the point that browser-based applications are close to providing features equal to those
of their OS-specific brethren. This year's nominated products from eRoom Technology and Lotus Development, and even the Web-based e-mail clients delivered with standards-based e-mail servers, show how far these applications have come. You'll soon start to see distributed applications that rely on .Net and ONE and use additional standards such as UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) to make the distributed infrastructure work.
Most of the enterprise software we tested in the past year included high-availability technologies. The shift toward enterprise software that is cluster-aware and supports automatic failover is in high gear. Developers are addressing reliability, scalability and manageability from the start of the software-development life cycle. Application downtime is too expensive for businesses that are using electronic processes at their core. We appreciate products, such as Novell's ZENworks for Desktops and Caldera Systems' Caldera Volution, that reduce the total cost of ownership for enterprise systems and increase availability by providing full-featured, directory-based management.
The critical components for making e-commerce fly are still authentication, identity and security. The technologies have outstripped the politics, but the political hurdles will be at least an order of magnitude more difficult to overcome. What we need is a reliable, universal directory that ensures identity via rock-solid authentication. Dream on, monkey boy. We'll settle for multiple trusted directories that interoperate and let admins grant or deny access to resources without needing to reinvent the wheel every time they install a new system.
Getting There
If you plan to base your business on Web applications, you'll need a mature infrastructure to support the special needs of an application environment distributed over the Internet. Consumers can and do type new URLs more quickly than they can drive to a competitor's physical location. We're talking about response times that are measured in seconds.
We've looked at software products designed to make your end users' WWW (wild and woolly Web) experience better, or at least palatable. Our reviews of back-end Web services, such as cache, application servers, Web-application management, search and indexing, and security analyzers, revealed second-, third- and later-generation products from established players like iPlanet and AltaVista and from newcomers such as Sanctum and Atomz.com.
"Webification" has changed the focus of ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors as well. As companies embrace the Internet as another source of business, they begin to view their systems from the inside out. ERP is moving toward its second incarnation; some analysts refer to this as ERP II. Integration with RM (relationship management) systems is becoming important. Portal vendors will make significant gains in presenting a unified front to a variety of back-end systems.
You'll also see more CRM (customer RM), MRM (marketing RM) and VRM (visitor RM) offerings -- providing the same model for sales and marketing that ERP provides for business processes.
All these products will stretch your imagination as you move critical content outside your corporate boundaries. The architecture, hardware and software needed to support such animals will not be insignificant, but vendors -- such as Siebel Systems and Pivotal Corp. in the xRM world and SAP and Baan on the ERP side -- are betting that the potential return on investment will provide the impetus to charge ahead.
Send your comments on this article to Ron Anderson at randerson@nwc.com.
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