Kinetic Information’s ongoing investigation of the business dynamics surrounding technology adoption has made it clear that ‘productivity’ in application development terms has taken on a new meaning and is causing a sea change in the way IT products and services will be bought and thereby sold.

Intensifying economic imperatives to work smarter and less expensively are leading many customers to realize that the keys to the kingdom lie in enabling enterprise interoperability (EIO): allowing their technology systems to work together and their business processes thereby to flow smoothly. This being the case, enhanced “speeds and feeds” no longer will be enough to assure vendor success, even in those markets (e.g., for imaging, processing, communications, etc.) where these sorts of performance metrics have always been paramount. Instead, success will turn on the ability of any one technology to work with any and all the others that it may rub up against, and to address the overall business context in which it is to be deployed.

Technology Trend
Going forward, application development therefore will be characterized by the mixing and matching of several essential functional components:

• Application servers
• Web services
• Workflow
• BPM/BAM

Customer Impetus
Current fiscal pressures are causing customer organizations to take a hard look at the way they do business and how they can better utilize technology to “drive costs out of our business” and “do more with less.” Their next step will be to take this operational intelligence and marry it to their IT planning so they can (a) leverage and extend their existing infrastructures and (b) identify which vendors can best address their particular needs. The result of this process-steeped introspection will be:

• a significant and permanent shift towards acquiring “converged solutions” rather than “pure play” technologies (see figure),

• a tangible turn toward hub-based architectures for enterprise computing and communications, and

• the emergence of wireless technology as a mainstream infrastructure component

• a distinct uptick in the number of meaningful partnerships that are forged,

• a flurry of merger and acquisition activity that will shake many smaller firms out of the mix,

• a renewed emphasis on brand recognition and customer value as vendors endeavor to achieve and maintain their competitive advantage, and

• an intensified market stratification along vertical market, company size, and organizational functional lines