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Survivor's Guide to 2006: Enterprise Apps and App Infrastructure: Page 3 of 14

From integration to routing to management and monitoring, the goal remains the same--optimization and control of business processes in an increasingly dynamic business environment. Process flexibility will remain the business driver for BPM. Before you know it, you'll be designing your enterprise SOA to support managing, optimizing and growing IT-enabled business processes. And you won't be alone. Fifty-one percent of firms will be using SOA by the end of 2005, Forrester predicts.

CRM and ERP

CRM may be dead, but CRM on demand is a booming business. After many large enterprises realized disappointing ROIs (returns on investments) on their huge CRM implementations in the 1990s, they turned to CRM on demand. Oracle's acquisition of Siebel and PeopleSoft may appear to have narrowed the field of products, but salesforce.com and Salesnet and a bevy of open-source-backed CRM on-demand providers are out there and will be vying for your business in 2006.

The wave of acquisitions in the ERP (enterprise resource planning) field also will make 2006 a year to reconsider your ERP implementation. Most organizations with an extensive ERP have never thought about replacing it, but that was before their vendors were snatched up by Oracle and other bigger fish. Bottom line: The ERP market is in flux.

The Repository