E-business: What's Next

The last decade has literally seen three major shifts in the business application landscape (see Figure 1).

• Phase 1 – re-engineering. Rewiring legacy applications using client-server computing to be more flexible.
• Phase 2 – e-commerce. Basic automation of sell-side business transactions with an emphasis on customer self-service.
• Phase 3 – e-business.  Rewiring the internal business operations applications using Internet technology.

What will Phase 1 of the new decade bring? This is the critical question facing strategy and business vision managers everywhere who are tasked with facilitating corporate strategy:

• What is beyond e-business? Is it more streamlined e-business? Is it an integrated multi-channel -- click and mortar -- infrastructure? Is it mobile commerce infrastructure? Is it voice commerce infrastructure? Is it a combination of all of the above? What really is coming next?
• What are the core business problems that companies feel the urgency to tackle? Is it creating a more real-time business process? Is it creating customer-centric process? Or, is it opening their boundaries so that external partner processes can work more in tandem with “closed” internal processes?
• What is the structure of the business application foundation needed to solve the new, previously unrecognized business problems going to look like in the next 3-5 years? Is it more evolution of frameworks like SCM and CRM? Is it new apps like cross-enterprise SCM that involve shared business processes. These apps have embedded services such as security, guaranteed delivery, and exception handling built-in to support mission-critical requirements.
• What is the nature of infrastructure investments that best prepare a firm for the future?  Does a firm pick a "best-of-breed" approach and tackle the complex integration problems by itself. Or, does it pick an integrated infrastructure stack such as Sun ONE and hope that the vendor has it all figured out? Infrastructure decisions are extremely tricky and often "bet-your-company" decisions that have to be made with extremely limited information.
• What innovations in technology or business solutions landscape are taking place concurrently that can provide a discontinuous tsunami similar to the Netscape Browser in 1994. Is it the Microsoft .NET framework?

Unless you have a clear map of what lies ahead, it would be very difficult to chart a journey.  Even more difficult for product companies, which have to nurture, direct and orchestrate an entire ecosystem of companies, a lack of a clear blueprint would create confusion and potential zigzag of strategic direction.

From our work, we are clearly seeing an evolution of E-business into M-business (a multi-device, multi-web, multi-channel) model.  The complexity of M-Business is rather astounding. Take for instance, one of  the emerging pillars of M-Business, Microsoft .NET.  There are so many things going on concurrently in .NET that lack of a clear understanding is going to problematic for companies. The same is true about the Sun ONE framework. The true breadth and depth of these frameworks is mind-blowing.

Obviously the time to worry about the next phase of business technology is now. This is especially true for application software firms that looking to position their products in the emerging space. In the next series of articles we will highlight key trends that provide insights into the next phase of business applications.