Is it just me or is life moving at a faster pace? OK, that was a facetious question. Let's get right to it: the pace of life, or at least the pace of business, is accelerating every day. The rate of change around business strategy, business processes, requirements…it's all ramped up by orders of magnitude just over the past few years.
This increased rate of change has carried right through to technology, which is just an enabling tool for strategy and processes when you get right down to it. If the rate of change for business has picked up, the lifecycle has shortened even more so for technology. I can remember a few years ago when I realized that any computer I purchased would be obsolete within a few weeks. Now I can't even keep up with the leading edge on my smart phone!
The impact has also rippled into enterprise applications development. Business is moving so quickly that there's just no time to write new solutions entirely from scratch…those days are gone. What I'm seeing more of these days is solutions being assembled rather than written from scratch…it's faster. Enterprise apps developers are assembling pre-existing components and services together in new and creative ways. And, once again...the assembly is faster.
Assembling enterprise apps is similar to building a mashup web app: it's based on creating what already exists in new and creative ways in order to meet a perceived need. And, in the enterprise apps world, we're seeing solution architects turn their focus from "what can we build to meet the need at hand" to "what can we assemble or stitch together to meet the need at hand".
The gist of enterprise applications solution design is moving from "what do we build" to "what do we reuse and connect". Think about that the next time you're performing or watching development work: how much is about the build and how much is about the assembly? I'll wager that you'll see the shift for yourself.
This is one of the big upshots underlying Fusion Applications. The apps were created, to a great degree, using this assembly method of development. And because of this, extending the apps is based on this assembly approach to development (connect pre-existing services and components in new ways). It's a quicker way to develop.
1 comment:
Great point Floyd. I think Packaged Enterprise applications also have gained wide adoption because they are very faster to implement as compared to custom developing those applications. Besides being faster they are supported well and provide good functional and vertical breadth but being faster to implement is very important as custom developing them may take much longer time and resources. Although they are very expensive as well as compared to custom developing using some open source tools, but the advantage they have is more important. Now with packaged applications getting implemented more and more, increasing business intelligence implementations developing new applications on top of them which use packaged apps and BI apps as data sources and render that information in newer ways along with providing social and collaboration capabilities seems to be an interesting idea as users may adopt these quickly and for benefits of enterprises. Oracle seems to be in good positons here with products and tech like Web center portal and ADF, which are used to develope fusion apps as well. This seems to be the next phase in evolution of enterprise apps. Cloud computing also looks promising to enterprises as next phase as having outsourced the task of creating a packaged application for a function / industry and a rapid application developement environment around it so that companies can focus on thier business logic/process rather than building a application from scratch, now seems to be the time for outsourcing most of the inhouse IT function by using cloud solutions like salesforce.com. Cloud computing also brings great power to developers by providing them great hardware, OS, Database resources at lower costs. With open source frameworks also maturing at fast pace, developers / entrepreneurs can develope solutions quickly and help enterprises reduce costs, lower implementation time and provide innovative solutions.
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