17 Nov. 2005
Forrester's vision of Digital Business Architecture foresees a transformation of the relationship between IT and the business, with diverse IT domains working together as one, enabling IT to deliver greater business flexibility. This either: 1) drives down a firm's IT spending, or 2) lets IT deliver more business value at the same spending level. Building a Digital Business Architecture means capturing business processes and policies as metadata and combining diverse trends like business process management (BPM), SOA, unified communications, and utility computing into a coherent model. And it's not a pipe dream; you can get started today by using joint business-IT teams to simultaneously design business processes and the IT solutions that embody those processes and connect them to the physical world.
How Firms Should Work With The Open Source Ecosystem
Firms are using open source software because they believe it will help them lower technology costs, escape vendor lock in, and increase flexibility. But working with open source is difficult for firms that are used to buying commercial software, in part because the open source movement hasn't focused on corporate needs that traditional software suppliers provide through a partner ecosystem. An open source ecosystem is emerging, however. Although this open source ecosystem is made up of many new types of organizations, such as communities and consortia, the organizations deliver the same four functions as closed source vendors: product development, distribution, services, and marketing. This map of open source players will enable firms to follow a practical approach to build their own open source ecosystem to suit their software needs.
The Eclipse Tools Market Enters The Next Phase
Forrester has long anticipated that Eclipse would change the tools landscape in more important ways than mere cost of acquisition. Commercial tools vendors are all wrestling with the implications of Eclipse on their business models and channels as well as their pricing structures. Meanwhile, users try to juggle the flexibility, complexity, and support challenges of a tool set composed of individual plug-ins rather than a monolithic, installable package. Two emerging responses: a blended commercial/open source economic model, as pursued by BEA Systems; and aggregates of Eclipse-based functionality, as exemplified by M7.
The Forrester Wave™: Process-Centric Software Configuration Management, Q4 2005
Process-centric SCM solutions unite software configuration management (SCM) and software change management, thereby enabling task orientation, traceability, and process automation throughout the development life cycle. To assess the state of the process-centric SCM market, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top process-centric SCM solutions across 121 criteria. The result: IBM's solution is both the strongest overall solution as well as the most widely used. The primary area in which IBM is weak -- process customization -- is a notable strength for the other vendors we evaluated. Microsoft's much anticipated market entry won't create much churn in installed bases, but it will grow the overall market -- by providing smaller Microsoft shops that haven't previously used process-centric SCM with an affordable, tightly integrated alternative.
Forrester Wave: Process-Centric Software Configuration Management, Q4 '05
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Bus, Q4 2005
Both groups want full support for SOA and a wholehearted embrace of open industry standards. |
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