Jeff Comport is one of the Role Service Directors for the Gartner for IT Leaders Application Manager program. He mentioned a couple of things that he was hearing for the first time during his one-on-one discussions with clients here at Symposium.

1. There's an overlap between application management and portfolio management. Application managers need to modernize their company’s application environment, and portfolio managers try to optimize IT investments. Both are charged with taking an inventory of the company's applications, spotting overlaps and gaps, and recommending what to eliminate or what to invest in. How do you reconcile these two functions? Do you keep them separate, put them together or do something else? This is a new challenge, and Comport said Gartner would develop research around the topic in the near future.

2. Application managers have become surprisingly interested in managing the skills of the people within their organization. They want to ensure that their organization has the right resources needed to deploy the applications of the future. For example, they have started using databases to keep track of what skills the organization has. They have become involved in helping their staff develop its skills. Comport hadn’t expected that application managers would become so deeply involved in an area that used to be left mostly to HR to manage.

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The future of the Internet and “all things web” will have an impact on all of us on a variety of levels from work through our personal lives. For many of us, this currently coalesces around the concept of web 2.0. While there are literally hundreds of takes on what web 2.0 is really all about, we focus on the following three “anchor” points:

• Technology and Architecture – consisting of web oriented architecture (WOA) and web platforms/technologies
  
• Community - the dynamics around social networks and other personal content public/shared models, wiki and other collaborative content models
  
• Business Models - web service-enabled business models, mashup/remix applications and so forth

When it comes to our work lives, how will all this impact the way we develop, buy, deliver and maintain applications? (As an aside, will the notion of an “application” even be relevant in a service-oriented future?)

Certainly, technologies such as Ajax will play into both the applications we develop and that we buy. Ironically, we risk making the same mistakes yet again when it comes to underestimating the value of excellent application design versus throwing excessively chatty applications on top of networks that often have high latencies. People will mistakenly assume that just because something is ‘web-centric’ means it will automatically work well over the vagaries of the Internet, which is simply not true. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that we will see examples of very poor performance from an end user perspective. In short, good design still matters.

The notion of end users being able to ‘mashup’ their own applications out of what internal IT organizations offer as well as what is available on the Internet has major implications with respect to innovation, governance, risk, etc. Potentially, a key capability of applications groups going forward will be to quickly identify new mashups, identify the ones that are most valuable to the enterprise, and then scale them to be enterprise strength. This is very different from the notion that many people have of identifying new mashups in hopes of reining them in. Yes, compliance implications potentially make controlling end user-based web innovation a necessity, but working with end users rather than shutting them down is likely to bring more success long term. Otherwise, internal IT once again risks irrelevance.

For those interested in a big picture view of all this that is very “out of the box”, I urge you to check out the Maverick presentation:

Rebels Versus Empires: The Cycle of Disruption and Discontinuity in Technology and Business – Ray Valdes, Neil MacDonald – ID: 13H

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Web 2.0, which we cover extensively throughout Symposium, including the following sessions:

Web 2.0 Basics: Principles, Practices and Platforms for the Enterprise – David Cearley and Nick Gall – ID: 01B
Web 2.0 Beyond the Buzz: What’s Real and What’s Not – David Mitchell Smith, Gene Phifer, Ray Valdes – ID: 11F
A Practical Approach to Using Ajax – Ray Valdes – ID: 03D
Web Technologies: Powering The Enterprise, SOA and More – David Mitchell Smith, Gene Phifer – ID: 22C
User Interaction: Spanning Portals, Ajax, and Mobile Devices – David Gootzit, Gene Phifer – ID: 32F
Will SODA Change Development or Will Development Change SODA in an SOA and Web 2.0 World? – Daryl Plummer – ID: 33F

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The first 35 years of enterprise IT have been characterized by “acquisition-based” applications strategies. That is to say, as an enterprise identified the possibility of using an application to improve the productivity of an administrative process, it would set out to acquire or build an application to fulfill that objective. While applications were comparatively isolated, with limited integration and with long latency, “application management” consisted largely of serial acquisitions (followed by a series of upgrades), each acquisition being considered largely on the merits of the individual application without overmuch weighting of any architectural considerations.

The “acquisitions-based” applications strategy approach is reaching the end of its natural life. The complexity of process integration and the demand for near-real-time management of processes creates a new set of challenges for applications integration and integrity that cannot be met by “serial acquisitions” application management policy. The difficulty that applications managers are experiencing in funding and organizing application upgrades is not a temporary “blip” but a clear indication that the paradigm is broken. Developing the migration route from the current haphazard applications architecture to one that is better positioned to support a 21st century business is going to involve developing and implementing new management structures and, above all, new models for financing applications based on a coherent long-term plan.

This is the tip of the iceberg on what we are starting to call enterprise platform migration. To see and hear much more on this come to my session entitled: The IT Planning Challenge of Enterprise Platform Migration – ID: 14E

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For some time now, SaaS has been one of the hottest topics across both the software and services portions of the IT industry. Many people view SaaS as the next generation of what will happen to software across the board. Others view it as yet another variation of countless ‘service’ models that can be traced back to service bureaus in the 1960s & 1970s, longstanding business process providers such as ADP and Paychex, application service providers (ASPs) of the late 1990s and early 2000s, etc. Across these views, there are common questions about: what SaaS really is, what value organizations can gain from using SaaS, where is it best applied, etc.

In the beginning of 2006, we had a research offsite where I had the personal pleasure of sitting in on the creation of an internal research community focused on SaaS. Analysts came from a variety of backgrounds: CRM, ERP, supply chain, application integration, IT services, and outsourcing just to name a few. Many of them had been covering variations on this theme for years, including the likes of “on-demand”, “business process outsourcing”, and service providers of countless types. It became painfully obvious that many of us were talking about different parts of the same “elephant." Ironically, we were using many of the same words, BUT we were using them differently! We struggled just to have a basic conversation because we didn’t really understand what each of us was saying in the room even though we were all very proficient regarding each of our own parts of the ”elephant." Maybe some of you have experienced the same thing/know this dynamic painfully well?

Solving this type of challenge is no small task. I was thrilled to see this community of analysts from across many different research groups step up to the critical challenge of creating common definitions and basic fundamentals required to have an insightful discussion on this topic. This community is ably led by Rob DeSisto and continues to have a regular set of interactions which have led to an excellent set of research not only defining SaaS, but where it is most appropriate, tips on selecting/contracting these types of offerings, etc.

To answer the title of this blog: Yes, it turns out that SaaS is bigger than the proverbial breadbox. In the last few years (and even recent months), we have seen an explosion of SaaS offerings across just about every aspect of software. As a case in point, see the Business Intelligence community blog on “Web Analytics and SaaS." Over time, we expect that just about every type of software offered today will have a SaaS variant. What are the keys to success? Certainly, the old adages of knowing what you really need and having business and IT joined at the hip in sponsoring and supporting these efforts are key. But there is much more, which I urge all of you to dive into by attending some of the following sessions:

Software as a Service: The Myth and Promise of No Software – Scott Nelson – ID: 12F
Software as a Service: The Real Action Begins – Benjamin Pring – ID: 31A
Software Industry Scenario: Bending to New Business Demands – Joanne Correia – ID: 13D

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Jamie Popkin and I have been working with the community of software analysts to create a new version of the Gartner Software Scenario for this year’s Symposia. Early on in our efforts, we agreed that we needed a section on how competition will evolve across today’s software markets. It didn’t take long for us to gravitate to a discussion centered on ‘ecosystems.’ The concept of an ecosystem is a great way to discuss the sophisticated relationships between users and suppliers, which has become a complex mix of symbiosis and survival of the fittest. However, as we were fleshing out the discussion, several of us felt frustrated that this was simply becoming a take on the partnership and go to market strategies of the major software suppliers.

We kept asking: isn’t there something more to this picture? Then a series of conversations and debates took us to some very interesting places.

First the basics:

• Ecosystems are about a complex set of inter-relationships between organisms that exist in the same environment and often compete with each other. Having a healthy ecosystem overall with a sense of balance is often better than having one organism dominate. However, the notion of survival of the fittest is very much front and center.


• The nature of competition in the software space is changing very much along the lines of an ecosystem. The fact that most user organizations buy capabilities from multiple leading software vendors makes it clear that this isn’t simply a version of a sporting event where one supplier wins and the game is over. The reality we are all living in is that competitors have to work together to help customers deliver on their mission or we will all find ourselves in stagnant business environments.

Every enterprise has an ecosystem of existing software, ranging from infrastructure through packaged applications and homegrown applications. In addition, an ever increasing set of ‘services’ are added into this ecosystem, ranging from the latest software as a service (SaaS) offerings through business process outsourcing (BPO), application service provider (ASP) offerings, etc. A wide range of professional services enable and support this ecosystem, including: consultants, integration firms, testing/QA experts, maintenance & support providers, etc. Additional factors such as open source, consumerizatin of IT, web 2.0 and the seemingly inexorable march towards service oriented architecture (SOA) serve as the backdrop of change drivers akin to changing climates in a biological ecosystem.

When the overall mission of an enterprise is taken into account, there are yet a different set of players in an ecosystem – those organizations that help make business occur by providing financial services, transportation and logistics, etc. As applications increasingly take on the form of services and services in turn look more like applications, traditionally separate markets collide. Players such as FedEx, UPS, DHL and postal services look like they are offering ‘applications’ that need to plug into an ecosystem. The same goes for the large banks, credit card networks, and insurance companies. Amazon, eBay and many other internet-centric organizations are additional examples of organizations that provide capabilities combining the role of application and actual business fulfillment capability. These players and broad services providers such as Accenture and EDS have a vested interest in delivering across traditional software supplier-centric ecosystems (much as Electronic Arts delivers video games across the major gaming platforms).

This implies that who the major players are in an ecosystem is likely to shift, which also means whom you will be paying and how you pay them is likely to change. In other words, I believe the answer is ‘YES’ -- software ecosystems are much more than go-to-market strategies and alliances centered on major vendors.

Throughout Symposia, sessions touch on this discussion at many levels. Two sessions in particular that I highly recommend to anyone interested in this are:

• “Rebels vs. Empires: The Cycle of Disruption and Discontinuity in Technology and Business” by Ray Valdes and Neil Mac Donald.


• “The IT Planning Challenge of the Century: Enterprise Platform Migration” by Andy Kyte.

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