In this dynamic business world, enterprises look towards constantly improving, realigning & automating their operations to remain nimble and be ever-ready to meet market challenges. Customer demands, market dynamics, and technology advancements are pushing solution frameworks to be aligned towards an experience of end-to-end process fulfillment. Enterprise customers have begun to appreciate the significance of product architectures in determining the effectiveness and suitability of solutions in scaling up to meet such requirements. All other things being equal, the success of software vendors would be to a large extent dependant on these strengths. Such architectures need to assimilate emerging technologies and support evolving business requirements. The very high life cycle cost of enterprise applications imposes limits on the ability of configured software to meet varying business demands. Such being the situation, the ray of hope is that, the limitations of the traditional architecture can be substantially overcome with the fast emerging next generation enterprise architecture.

At a fundamental level, the role of software is not meant for just enabling business alone but to keep pace with the dynamics of changing trends in business. Packaged apps are struggling to keep up with today's dynamic business processes all that well. Some see that there is a fundamental mismatch between application functionality and their core business requirements. Preconfigured software provides for supporting a number of pre-determined, "flexible" options; reality shows that this flexibility is not without limits - the enabling choices boil down to a list of existing, preordained combination of options. This leads to the situation that mostly IT applications become a barrier & not an enabler of business change, as the application rules, processes, data definitions, and user interfaces are encompassed as codes -calling for deep technical skills to modify. Business improvements, transformations & innovations are clearly not getting the needed support from these flexible features. The next generation of enterprise architecture must support business changes to be adopted on an elastic, on-demand basis by keeping pace with business evolutions. Across the spectrum of industries, sectors, regions, enterprises - there are underlying unique nature of processes,( granted that there may be a significant degree of common denominator) calling for specific solution approaches and frameworks. The current approach of architecting solutions towards accommodating conflicting, overlapping & unique requirements invariably leads to complex solutions propping up bloatware in the process. Provisions made for minor constituents/stakeholders force the majority to tolerate unwanted set of functionalities. Focused, lean products addressing specific constituencies would allow customers to adapt software that meets their own, individual needs. The next generation of application architecture must gratuitously support business processes cutting across application boundaries. An ideal composite solution shall integrate business processes, applications and data, and extend incremental functionalities to "plug the gaps" to produce a cohesive, composite application that ensures semantic, transactional & contextual integrity across the business process. Wide and varied technologies, formats & protocols need to be managed for cross-applications and would obviously force specific solutions to be rolled out. Practical experience suggests that it may be difficult to easily build & maintain composites as it would demand sophisticated process modeling, integration & transformative capabilities - be it at the process-level, data-level, or at the presentation layer level, and good master data management framework needs to be in place. The architecture will need to provide support for integration at various levels - business process level, application integration level, and application extension level to enable enterprises to maximize the benefits by facilitating the tying together of varied applications in a way that the resultant composite application is better than the sum of its parts. In the world of composites, application boundaries disappear and applications gradually imbibe such architectural capabilities

Some software vendors take a paced approach towards moving into next generation architecture, quite clearly a very difficult process with less than assured eventual success. SAP's ESA (Enterprise Service Architecture) is all about providing enterprises with the facility to add layers of important new levels of flexibility while allowing customers to maintain and build upon their existing solutions investments through Web services. Some others attempt adding smart capabilities to the BPM layer enabling systems to respond automatically to information flows. The BPM framework supports component to act as an information processor/router, controlling the information flow across the loosely coupled disparate applications and alleviating/eliminating the need for difficult to manage point-to-point/hub & spoke integration solutions. Futuristic enterprise products will provide in depth support to industry functionalities and offer tight integration capabilities with vertical solution that are of best-of-breed 'bolt-on' product types. The core processes are enshrined within the anchor system, with add-on products enriching the environment with supplementary metadata, rules, event monitors & notifications A combination of industry functionality & robust process support characterizing to support multiple types of enterprise processes significantly enhances the functional fit and eventually hastens the pace of rollouts. Software vendors have opened up their tightly interwoven underpinnings and are offering a broad range of open integration schemas, including XML messaging, standard connectors & open APIs, as easy integration to 3rd-party applications is becoming a non-negotiable feature. With various forces at interplay, clearly composites are becoming the next step for users that have embraced the more open interfaces and utilized the improved integration capabilities that the software vendors are providing. The current state of the art technology does not mend itself towards creating a 'future-proof' architecture wherein flexibility lay within the system to add both business functions and change underlying technology platform (at one level this is a basic expectation of business). The next generation of enterprise architecture must bestow the business with more actionable choices.

How do vendors move into newer architectures - While the progressive evolution strategy might be safer in the short run for both the customers and the vendor, minimizing both investments & disruption, this strategy has limits in how much can be accomplished. The existing product imposes limits on the amount of innovation that can be absorbed. Mega vendors though endowed with huge resources, also have the baggage of supporting a large customer base. Concerns about existing customers / current product lines overwhelm in the decision to adopt newer ideas, methods and features. Leading edge vendors are beginning to rewrite their applications on new application frameworks. Componentization technology has proven to be crucial to enable back-office functions, though with the best of preparation and efforts, componentization may become too difficult to achieve. Late/Poor adoption of component technologies can be to a large extent mitigated by embracing emerging web services/service oriented technologies. Developers may begin to create/extend applications by connecting granular components, accessible via open standard protocols. Adherence to standards further enhances the versatility & scalability of products, sometimes providing even platform independence and can make it simpler in nature for business to adopt. Data sharing & common look-and-feel across an application, without code level tinkering becomes a practical reality in this new world.

Software vendor's execution of their futuristic strategies would come into sharper focus as users would realize that migrating older instances and/or integrating them to other software will remain resource consuming & painstaking for some time to come. New solutions within enterprises shall find easy fitment to newly rearchitected products, capable of actualizing automation and transformation of processes end-to-end. Short term investments shall look at leveraging BPM/EAI alternatives. Product vendors with strong application functionalities & geared to provide good support to composite applications would score better - and shall begin to displace incumbents unready for the new generation of architecture. Trends show that componentized software products, interoperability standards and Internet technology will lead to a rich array of considered choices for enterprises to adopt. Enterprises shall actively begin looking at new protocol adherences, standards and technologies in order to benefit from Web services/SOA frameworks. With large scale consolidations happening within the industry, the basis of competition shifts from plain market muscle, promotions and fast moving abilities to providing future proof architectures and good support to business processes through repository centric integrated offering benefiting the business across the extended value chain..

S. Sadagopan, heads consulting and eBusiness for Satyam in the Asia Pacific, Middle Eastern and African markets based out of Singapore. He has led several consulting and technology transformation engagements covering multiple industries cutting across wide variety of technologies around the world. His blog is focused on emerging technologies & trends.