New Enterprise Application Market Place Apps Giving Custom Built and Commercial Software the Boot

Many businesses either rely on in-house custom software or purchase and customize commercial software packages to meet their mission critical business needs. Unfortunately these approaches are failing to meet the needs of enterprises as they demand faster development and deployment times for these apps. To address that challenge, a new group of vendors in the cloud promises to improve these mediocre mission critical business processes by speeding up development/deployment cycles while reducing the total cost of ownership of enterprise applications.

Historically, Information Technology (IT) departments from the global 2000 custom built and maintained all mission critical software applications required to run their businesses. These custom homegrown software systems included support for Financial, Manufacturing, Human Resource Management (HRM), Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) requirements.

Unfortunately, these systems proved to be almost universally:

• Expensive to build
• Obsolete before they were implemented
• Expensive to maintain
• Difficult to expand and enhance
• Difficult or impossible to integrate into other systems

As a result, a new market opportunity emerged for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software and gave birth to a new whole new set of vendors such as Oracle, IBM, SAP and HP (just to name a few) to develop and market mission critical business applications that met 80%-90% of most global 2000 requirements.

This led to many enterprises adopting and relying on these elite COTS software vendors and their armies of consultants to support them. However these COTS solutions also fell short of the hype with their list of failures and shortcomings similar to those of the homegrown systems.

While organizations have struggled on with one or both of these solutions, their ability to continue to doing so is seriously in question. The rapid emergence and associated enterprise adoption of cloud computing, mobile computing and social media are resulting in exploding data volumes with similarly complex requirements to manage this information.

This is lead to application development and deployment professionals within enterprise IT departments to begin exploring the use of cloud computing infrastructures such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), cloud computing application delivery options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and new software development approaches based on Open Systems code sharing, interoperable cloud based middleware and enterprise application market places.

Fortunately next generation vendors with next generation technologies have stepped up to fulfill the evolving needs of the marketplace. One such genre of the new COTS software vendors that are offering a completely next generation approach to these evolving enterprise requirements are the enterprise application marketplace providers.

The concept of an application marketplace became main stream through the widespread use of the iPhone App Store. Thanks to the iPhone and the iPhone App Store, smart phone and mobile computing device users may purchase both personal and business applications over the Web, install them on their devices and seamlessly integrate with other applications. This demand has fostered a billion dollar application development marketplace worldwide.

Two prime examples include:

• WordPress. From a website developers perspective, it wasn't that many years ago that most sophisticated websites had to be hand coded in HTML. Since then WordPress has emerged to provide developers with a marketplace of interoperable building blocks or plugins that allow website developers to literally drag and drop functionality into their sites with little or no responsibility for writing code.

• SalesForce.com. Addressing the Small to Medium sized business (SMB) market, Salesforce.com, best known for its SaaS based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) success, also created an application marketplace based on its Salesforce Platform, a leading cloud based application development platform for creating business applications. There are lots of COTS components available to purchase and utilize and a fairly active development community with on-line forums to support development efforts.

Successes like these have led to the emergence of several next generation vendors that offer enterprise class cloud-based application development platforms and associated Enterprise Application Marketplaces:

• Covisint offers mission-critical external business process software that enables organizations to connect, engage, and collaborate with external audiences such as customers, business partners, and suppliers that define their success. Already present in the automotive and healthcare market, Covisint plans to expand into other verticals.
• SnapLogic has developed over 150 intelligent connectors (called Snaps), and robust APIs to support the quick and easy integration of enterprise data and application, behind the firewall, outside the firewall and in the cloud. These Snaps shield both business users and developers from much of the complexity of the underlying application, data model, and service. Using its SnapStore organizations may purchase and download a Snap in seconds.
• kCura, has developed the Relativity Ecosystem, an integration platform that allows litigation support professionals, independent consultants, and third-party software providers to design, build, and integrate applications to extend Relativity's functionality.

The Relativity Ecosystem already includes best-in-breed integrations and highly customized products that were built by ISV Partners and the advice@kCura team. Users may pick and choose the solutions that best suit their particular workflows, integrating them to more easily and efficiently transfer data between software packages that serve different stages of the e-discovery process.

What these vendors share in common is their ability to:

• Reduce time to market (get applications from design to implementation much faster than ever before)
• Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
• Deliver applications that dramatically increase operational efficiencies

Historically, enterprise IT departments either built and maintained mission critical software applications required to run their businesses or relied upon commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software. However as the time required to bring new products and services to market have shortened, the need for a new generation of products has emerged.

It is into this gap that next generation vendors with next generation technologies have stepped up to fill these evolving needs of the marketplace. The emergence of Enterprise Application Marketplaces in the cloud provides a new approach that promises to speed up enterprise development and deployment cycles while also reducing the TCO of enterprise applications.