Application functionality and software technology are the future direction of business software. The dot-com bubble has burst. Many highly visible dot-com start-ups have vanished, and the market value of the survivors falling. But a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) says that e-business is not necessarily dead.
It is, in fact, just the beginning, and the continued development of business applications and enabling software is not being controlled by the economy.
Now that the gold fever has subsided, and the IT sector is back to work with a new focus on development of tools and infrastructure, there's a need to find an additional market for e-business for every facet of business activity.
These are some of the main conclusions of PwC's annual Technology Forecast 2002-2004, Volume 1, entitled 'Navigating the Future of Software'. The forecast has been published since 1988.
Mike Katz, manager of PwC's global technology centre, explains, "The infusion of functionality for diverse businesses has been the primary factor that has influenced the development of business applications in the past year."
Software sector changes
And we can look forward to more and more sophisticated developments in that area, with vendors gradually releasing next generation of applications based on e-business, which will bring important changes to the software industry.
And, according to Mikael Blinking of the Technology Group in Denmark, Microsoft's recent acquisition of Navision (see July 18th, 2002) is expected to begin a process of merging and consolidation within the software industry across Europe and other countries.
Integration challenge
The biggest technical challenge facing most businesses with information technology applications is application integration. Many are already (or nearly are) in the process of changing from a software architecture based Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) middleware to an architecture where the application is split into less components - an architecture that is much easier to integrate, according to the forecast report's editor, Eric Bergamot.
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