The coming of composites

Enterprise software has been of great interest to me since the college days. Sadgopan who heads eBusiness and Consulting for Satyam has written an excellent article on evolution of enterprise software and the direction it is going to take in future. He is musing

With globalization and a flat world increasingly beginning to force enterprises to become more competitive the business climate began to slowly change – the new rule of the game demanded agility as the key driver for success in general – the game changed and began to favor the fast moving against the slower one and big size did not necessarily confer advantages on business entities by default.

Do read it over here at sandhill.com. He concludes that the enterprise software is moving towards composite applications made from mash-up of existing apps. My own take on the software evolution can be summarized in very few words –

First there were custom apps,
Then came COTS^[1]
Now is the age of the composite applications

What is more motivating in the story is validation of SAP’s Netweaver Intiative. Being a Netweaver professional it makes me smile. Quoting Sadgopan

SAP is said to be devoting as much as a third of its overall R&D efforts towards building composites & its roadmap promises to provide its customers with the ability to create new business processes on the fly & avoid any rebuilds

[1] Commercial Off The Shelf