What about enterprise applications?
What is interesting for the software provider community is the fact that this new reality is about to encompass the world of enterprise applications. Business users are, of course, also consumers and they use web applications on a daily basis. So the expectations for ready access to information and services, rich user interfaces and ease of use are brought to the workplace.
But enterprise applications do not always meet these demands, so business users are increasingly turning to the Web for alternatives – a process that cannot easily be controlled by their companies. This is putting pressure on IT departments to provide web based solutions and many suppliers of enterprise applications have already begun to respond to demand from corporate customers and have introduced web-based variants of their solutions. Enlightened IT departments are actively making access to powerful web services available to their users.
Another trend that is contributing to the establishment of the internet as an application platform is the move away from dedicated data centers. Companies are beginning to exploit a range of alternatives from using external hosting companies and outsourcing to using web based applications, with huge savings in infrastructure costs.
The internet is an extremely flexible environment that can scale to accommodate any size of application or database and service any number of users worldwide. Most importantly, companies have come to accept that security of information is no longer an issue. The banking industry moves vast sums over the internet and sensitive information is routinely managed by web applications.
The internet is, in fact, a great deal more secure as a data repository than local servers in an office or easily lost laptops and offers far more options for disaster recovery. When these factors are added to the wealth of web services that can be easily be integrated with their corporate applications, why would any company want to own and manage expensive data centers?
The challenges for application providers
