This week Optaros released a free survey report entitled 'How Will Enterprises Deliver Next Generation Internet Applications?'. Over 400 senior decision makers responded to the survey, which looked at how enterprises will deliver the next-generation of Internet applications. A little background on Optaros: it describes itself as "an assembler of Next Generation Internet applications (NGI) leveraging open source components". So bear that in mind when reading the report (particularly with the custom development findings, mentioned below).
Key findings of the survey include:
Note that the survey results point to custom development as being a strong trend. However this appears to contradict the recent Forrester reports about Enterprise and web 2.0, which we covered on Read/WriteWeb. Forrester's analysis concluded that CIOs have a strong desire to purchase web 2.0 products "as a suite, as well as an equally strong desire to purchase these technologies from large, incumbent software vendors." Large incumbent software vendors tend to provide off-the-shelf products and Forrester's research indicated this is the case with web 2.0 software too. However Optaros may be right that custom development is still a strong trend within enterprises. Back in the day when I was a Web Manager for enterprises, there was a good mix of off-the-shelf and custom development. I don't think custom dev was as high as 80% though, as the Optaros results indicate. I'd be interested in readers thoughts on this...
Custom Built vs Off-the-shelf software
I do like Optaros' finding that "customers now expect a two-way conversation with companies" - 60% of enterprises are aware of this, but only 19% of current online apps in the enterprise achieve it. This sounds about right and shows there is still a lot of potential for software vendors to add 'two-way web' functionality to their offerings. This could include blogging, wikis, sharing and collaboration features in office products, etc.
This chart represents % of respondants who invested in the above areas (social networking, etc)
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Full disclosure. I work for Optaros and previously I worked for Forrester (1997 ‚Äì 2002). I agree there is a grey area between the two study findings. I believe Forrester struck a cord with corporate CIO who is concerned with making a bet on the wrong vendor‚Ķespecially one that may not be around for long. Optaros struck a cord with their audience who realize the ‚Äúvendor lock-in‚Ä? model is not the right approach for a collaborative web environment. I believe assembling different technologies (open source if you can get them) is the right approach because it doesn‚Äôt have all of the pain of line by line custom coding and helps avoid vendor lock in. Nothing is perfect but it‚Äôs a step in the right direction.
Posted by: Jeff | April 6, 2007 8:33 AM
The Enterprise will indeed deliver us the Next Generation, but unfortunately we'll have to wait until the 24th century.
Posted by: Brian | April 8, 2007 5:21 PM