Business applications are no longer just tools to help you do business; in many cases, these complex pieces of software run your business. From customer support to collaborative business applications, from employee productivity software to Web servers, from that custom-developed software running your core business processes to purchased products providing analysis--applications move, manipulate, analyze and share the data needed for corporate strategic planning. Without a solid application infrastructure, your business is toast.
Imagine if even one of your critical business applications suffered several hours of downtime. Panic would spread through the building as half your IT staff tried to fix the problem and the other half shuttled faxes and handwritten orders between customer service and a row of phones and fax machines.
Automation became a key feature in applications during the past year. Application vendors are focusing on automating routine tasks, freeing up people to build your business, and increasing the productivity of analysts by providing more data, more often.
Another key area is Web services. By the second half of 2004, 40 percent of Global 2000 enterprises will have unauthorized, undocumented and unmonitored Web services connections that extend beyond their perimeters, according to Gartner. If that doesn't scare you, you haven't been listening: WSDL (Web Services Definition Language) provides a system-independent way for your applications to say, "If you want to talk to me, here's how you have to do it"--human-readable pointers into your internal business process and data--what services you have running, their data formats, even how to access them.
Despite these concerns, the payoffs can be great, not only in better application integration and seamless interactions but in very flexible business processes. In fact, 102 of 191 readers we recently polled said Web services would be of "fundamental importance" in the way software applications are built and deployed at their organizations.
The real-time enterprise is coming, but to survive, you must ensure that your underlying application and network infrastructures can support it.
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