Columns
Updating the real-time enterprise
- By Michael W. Bucken
- October 31, 2002
As Lana Gates and Jack Vaughan point out in their cover
story (Status update: The
real-time enterprise
), the corporate quest for the so-called
real-time enterprise has rambled along for a few decades or so. Throughout these
years, executives have ordered IT to produce systems that can provide key data
in real time, a loosely defined term that can confuse even the brightest
developer.
The Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) rage a few
years back, along with other emerging technologies, prompted a June 1999 cover story
in these
pages about a so-called real-time revolution. At the time, our reporters found
several experts who declared that new middleware technologies had the potential
to fundamentally change the way large corporations did business. We wrote about
the promise of the zero-latency enterprise and the enterprise nervous
system.
But a flagging economy and the simultaneous bursting of the EAI bubble
stalled efforts to create a real-time enterprise. As this month's authors point
out, corporations became reluctant to take on any large project, much less one
with some real risk. Nevertheless, some major players, like IBM, SAP and
PeopleSoft, are preparing for another wave of real-time activity to emerge in
better times. IBM, for example, has boosted its real-time technology with a few
acquisitions, including once high-flying EAI tool supplier Crossworlds.
Gates and Vaughan take a look at the latest efforts to renew the real-time
enterprise push with new labels like the ''event-driven organization'' or the
''performance-driven enterprise'' to solve a problem that still exists after all
these years.
Meanwhile, regular contributor Colleen Frye looks at the
emergence of so-called collaborative development
as more and more corporate IT development
organizations deal with the complex issue of bringing together widely
distributed development teams that may cross departmental or even company
boundaries. When projects need specific expertise, managers must often look far
and wide to find it. Thus, Frye notes, the need for enhanced collaboration and
teamwork among corporate developers is becoming paramount.
For this story, Frye talked to IT organizations utilizing tools built to
support open-source collaboration that are then extended to allow the use of
proprietary technologies, a key requirement for most corporations. Frye found
these new tools take a page from open source, both in terms of building
community -- one of the strengths of the open- source world -- and in working in
distributed teams across the Internet.
Best regards,
Michael W. Bucken
About the Author
Mike Bucken is former Editor-in-Chief of Application Development Trends magazine.