Monday, December 16, 2002		Feature

THE bursting of the dotcom bubble through the disappearance of many of the highly visible dotcom startups and the decline in the market value of its survivors should not be mistaken for the end of e-business. In fact, it is just the beginning.

With the gold rush over, the IT industry is going back to work and refocusing on building the tools and infrastructure needed to push e-business further into every facet of business activity and every day life, according to Navigating the Future of Software, released by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world’s largest professional services organisation.

"Many companies felt the pain of the dotcom implosion, but the exuberance that marked the past few years left behind some positive aspects that will help carve out the future of enterprise software," Roopen Roy, leader of the PricewaterhouseCoopers India

Technology and Solution Delivery Centre said.

Roy said the addition of inter-enterprise capabilities has been the major factor influencing the development of corporate applications during the past few years. The future will see increasing sophistication of these capabilities as vendors release their next generation of e-business enabled applications, leading to significant changes in the software industry," he said.The study explores the ongoing emphasis on inter-enterprise capabilities and other functional enhancement trends influencing the development of enterprise applications, including analytic capabilities, collaboration, mobility, portals, real-time computing and usability.

"Possibly the greatest technical challenge facing most large organisations today in their use of IT in application integration. Many enterprises now are or soon will be in the midst of transition from a software architecture based on the use of middleware to connect packaged applications suites to one in which applications are divided into smaller components that are much easier to integrate," Mr Roy said.