BEA Systems today mourned the death of the traditional packaged enterprise application but celebrated the birth of its successor - the dynamic business application.
The rigidity of IT packages of days gone by are no longer viable to help businesses survive in a world where information access models have completely changed, Alfred Chuang, the company's founder, chairman and chief executive, told delegates during his keynote speech at BEAWorld 2007 in Barcelona this morning.
"I really haven't been this excited since we started talking about Java back in 1998. We're on the cusp of a new era of enterprise computing. It's every bit as disruptive as Java and changing forever the way IT will deliver business value," he said.
"The way people access and use information and home and in the office is changing at such an unprecedented rate. Businesses have to innovate to take advantage of these opportunities or else they will become irrelevant because people are using information differently... I'm here to be controversial. The era of the traditional packaged enterprise application is over. It's dead. The era of analysing a business process for a year is over because we don't have time. The era of spending five years and €50 million implementing business applications is no longer viable."
Chuang claimed that BEA's response to this new dawn was in the form of dynamic business applications. This new breed of applications will be moulded around the precise way users work, under the umbrella of BEA's Project Genesis platform initiative, which was announced at BEAWorld in San Francisco last month. A more definitive roadmap is expected to be unveiled before the end of the year.
"[Dynamic business applications] can provide a response in days not years. They embody the business process and are built to be changed and give knowledge workers what they need to do their job without switching from application to application. We see a future where user driven applications proliferate every industry in real time...It's all about making software as a service easier and more manageable," he said.
