The second coming of best of breed applications!

BANGALORE, INDIA: There was a time when mainframes and terminals ruled the data centers and offices of corporate America. Then came the client server push led by Oracle, Sybase and Sun which unleashed the first wave of disruptive technology within the enterprise. IT Organizations started to put lot of computing power in the hands of their users.

It was a new beginning for the computer application industry and a whole set of application software companies like People Soft, Siebel, Oracle, SAP etc emerged as market leaders in business categories like HR, CRM, Manufacturing and Financials. That was the first coming of best of breeds applications. Corporations started to jump on to this band wagon in hoards and soon started to realize the pain of integrating, upgrading and maintaining these systems.

Maintenance and Integration cost started to skyrocket way past the software licensing costs. Corporations came out of this whole experience realizing that the cost of integrating these systems far out weights the benefit of going with best of breed. Application software companies took advantage of this opportunity to expand their product lines to cross functional boundaries. Application companies started to look like "Jack of all Trades, But master of none!"

During this time, a new software delivery model started to emerge. Applications on Demand! It was companies like Corio (bought by IBM) that started this new trend. Their business model was to take off the shelf ERP/CRM application and host it to increase ROI for their customers. Conceptually this was very ground breaking. However they faced immense challenges trying to host these monolithic applications that were never built to support the on demand model. This effort was immediately followed by the emergence of a new set of application software companies focusing on Software As a Service (SaaS) delivery model and Salesforce.com lead the way. Success of Salesforce.com marks the beginning of SaaS as a viable software delivery model that can greatly benefits the customers.

While all this was happening, there was a huge push for standardization in the industry. Web Service standard was the most notable one. Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. WSDL and SAOP became software development mantras.

SaaS has paved the way for the second coming of Best of Breeds Apps by lowering the adoption cost and risk. Customers for the first time will be able to enjoy the lower cost of ownership and a higher ROI from their software investments. Nothing comes free! As more and more best of breed SaaS applications starts to emerge (eg. Salesforce.com, Workday, Coupa, Netsuite, Zuora, Intacct, Taleo etc...), process gaps will start to widen as you start integrating them. You may ask, doesn’t this lead to the same integration problem that companies had to deal with during the early days of Best of Breed adoption. Yes. It is! Hope you can see the Technology Spiral now.

The big difference this time around is that we are well prepared to address this issue with the help of open standards like web services. A new category of tools are being readied by companies to tackle this problem that will help you bridge these process gaps by building Business Mashups without having to write a single line of code and best of all you can deploy these Mashups to the cloud. I wonder, are we at the gates of “Softopia” where software is assembled without having to write a single line of code. J

So the big question is, is your company ready for the Second Coming of best of breed apps?

The author is a software developer at Serena Software.