Gartner vice president and analyst Gene Phifer yesterday urged IT professionals to cut back on the application jungle and move toward a real time enterprise.
Speaking at SAP's Asia Pacific user conference (Sapphire) in Brisbane, Phifer said it is time to migrate to the real time enterprise.
"There are organizations running tens of thousands of applications out there. They have to cut back,” Phifer said.
He said a real time enterprise is proactive, not reactive pointing out that flexibility is the key.
However, layers of software apps has made many organizations inflexible.
Once upon a time, Phifer said, life used to be very simple when it came to IT.
“Then, with the advent of new technology, we suddenly swung from a world that was very simple in terms of IT to one that was very complex,” Phifer said.
However, Phifer now believes that after swinging from simple to chaotic, the IT industry is now swinging back to somewhere in the middle. “New applications and new innovations from vendors are going to allow the IT industry to swing back into the middle,” Phifer said.
SAP is nicely positioned to embrace the brave new world of SOBA (services oriented business applications), he said, delivering an overview of SAP's NetWeaver platform.
SAP executive board member Shai Agassi pushed the point further claiming NetWeaver can save organizations thousands of man hours integrating disparate systems.
Agassi has promised 1000 referenceable NetWeaver customers by year's end, 30 of which will come from Australia.
Recent local wins include the Health Insurance Commission (HIC) and Franklins.
Siobhan McBride travelled to the Sapphire conference in Brisbane as a guest of SAP.