A couple of years ago, we worked with a large number of clients to pull together a view of the most important things applications leaders of all types must do on an on-going basis. This came together into the Application Leaders Activity Cycle:



You can read more about this in our "2008 Research Agenda for Application Leaders" or have a one-to-one meeting with Susan Landry.

Note that "Innovate" is one of the major things all applications leaders need to do. One great source of innovation is all the small vendors bringing cutting edge new ideas to market. We just published our latest special report on many innovative ideas and vendors: "Cool Vendors 2008 – Innovation From Around the World." This report contains over 40 detailed research notes looking at cool vendors in various spaces. Here are a few of the detailed notes that you might find particularly interesting: Application Development, Platform Integration and Middleware and Web Technologies. One great thing about the Summits is that you can visit with several of these vendors live.

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Dan Sholler mentioned to me that as he was building the presentation for the Future of Integration Keynote, it struck him that integration and creating interoperability between systems is becoming tied more and more to the web.
He was working on this slide:





Dan's take is that we all have been doing "the web" for many years. However, it is only now that we are really seeing the need to use the technologies, techniques and standards from the web as the architecture of our enterprise applications. He believes this shift creates obvious technological challenges (for example, how to build user interface components, and whether we can run client-side standalone software in a browser). However, it also is causing a re-think of some of our fundamental designs. For example, taking a resource-oriented approach to our information models exposes many of the anomalies that have been lurking there for years.

As we move toward integration that is more widespread, and more event driven, we also must move toward integration that is more standardized, and that standardization must exist across more domains than ever before. Ultimately we must envision our internal IT capabilities as part of the larger web-federation, or the vision of SOA, of composite applications, and of modern integration will not come to pass. For those of you interested in this subject, there is an entire track of sessions dedicated to Effective Integration in the Age of SOA.

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