The next few years will bring major changes to software in the enterprise – from the back office to the desktop, affecting both IT departments and end users. Software as a service (SaaS) is just taking hold, and Gartner predicts that “the move in software development towards services spells the demise of the monolithic application, and with it the dominant positions held by leading software vendors in the market.” Meanwhile, open-source projects such as Open Office are also just gathering momentum.
But one monolith Microsoft, is both moving into SaaS and launching a new enterprise software initiative, a challenge to IBM: “Microsoft argues that by integrating those user-oriented software packages thoroughly with back-end programs for data storage, communications, and business-process management, it puts companies’ ordinary employees, rather than the geeks, at the center of the computing world,” writes Steve Hamm in BusinessWeek.
Some of these changes will lead to long-term improvements, but the short term is fuzzier. Changing to new and multiple vendors means possible down time, multiple support paths, new user interfaces requiring additional training, and document portability issues. Computer complexity is already costly for companies with every employee wasting an average of one week each year struggling with renegade PCs. During the Soft Wars, vendors must focus on avoiding collateral damage.
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