Looking ahead

Pundits predict future application and system changes

• Web services  will come to you. Enterprise software providers will migrate their offerings to a more Web services-compliant architecture over the next five years, says Joshua Greenbaum, a principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting. “Customers who adhere to standard maintenance and upgrade procedures will eventually get an applications architecture that is fundamentally more Web services-compliant than it is today – even if they do nothing other than pay their maintenance upgrades and install the new software,” Greenbaum says.

• The need for systems integrators will diminish. “We see the systems integration market shifting over the next seven to 10 years as the integration problem gets solved architecturally,” says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink. “If you identify yourself as a systems integrator, you’re going to need a new job. You need to be an architectural consultant or a business process consultant.”

• Policy administrators will emerge. “I foresee a new type of role within an organization, which is a policy administrator,” says Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. A company will have a chief policy officer whose organization is responsible for defining corporate policies pertaining to application issues such as security, performance and transaction execution. These policies will be manifested in a runtime framework that sits above the application framework and automatically implements tasks according to a set of policies, removing the onus from developers, Manes says.

– Ann Bednarz