CTO Blog | May we live in interesting times!

A company's ability to differentiate now resides in the exception-rich business processes that exist between applications, rather than inside the applications themselves. The business has been quick to pick up on this trend, and their focus is shifting to funding capabilities enabled by IT, rather than IT assets themselves. Making a case to spend four years and $50 million fielding a major IT asset is becoming harder; however justifying a project mixing integration, a rules engine and some new application components to deliver a tangible business capability has never been easier.

This is an interesting way to encapsulate the state of enterprise technology. My interpretation? That the enterprise packages or suites from companies like SAP and Oracle have reached the 80% level, where they provide enough functionality and coverage that a company can reliably automate many of their mission-critical business processes. They've become a platform—a framework, really—on which technology to handle the exceptions and deliver insight-fueling information can be built.

In a funny way, this puts the emphasis back on good, old-fashioned application architecture, design, and development. The integrated enterprise suites have raised the level where we draw the boundaries for platforms.

Companies used to build it all themselves, then the packages promised to do away with that. They're getting there. Coult it be that, in the end, the rich, integrated enterprise application suite will provide the capabilities to spark a new round of do-it-yourself?