If It Ain’t Broke, Build on Top of It

The rapidly changing nature of business is a given. As the business landscape evolves, so too must internal processes and operations, industry regulations, new venues for conducting business, such as the cloud and mobile environments. Consequently, it’s now even more necessary to maintain continuous uptime for business-critical applications and fast, accurate decision making capabilities for the people who drive the business. With customer demands accelerating faster than CapEx budgets, the business imperative is to seek out new ways to maximize efficiency, meet customer SLAs, and sustain a competitive edge—all without overhauling the IT infrastructure or embarking on pricey consulting engagements every time a cool new app bursts onto the scene. And you strive more than ever to deliver critical business intelligence with deep visibility into all systems and applications across the enterprise to ensure proactive, not reactive, responses. Rather than looking to proprietary software solution stacks that require many months of integration work or “rip and replace” of existing IT infrastructure, savvy IT leaders in all industries are scoping out enterprise software tools that will enable them to quickly deliver end-to-end, context-aware mobile-capable applications for customers and employees. Those offerings must use the events, business process, and business rules that are connected directly to their legacy applications and infrastructure because they are pre-integrated. This means that they:

• Lay on top of existing IT systems (including legacy and mainframe) - no more “rip and replace”
• Work alongside existing applications without requiring extensive manual scripting or application downtime each time an upgrade becomes available
• Remain interdependent on one another, thus eliminating the requirement for a complete stack in order to realize value quickly
• Can be easily controlled and maintained through a single lens (single interface) by business users, reducing dependencies on IT and accelerating the time required to apply changes

Understandably, this is a sorry state of affairs for anyone who actually enjoys lengthy scripting work for application upgrades and custom integrations. My condolences to both of you!