1.1 Why Software Development Must Consider the Whole Enterprise

The explosive growth of the Internet has created a truly global marketplace. Because this marketplace is accessible by any customer, anywhere in the world, even small companies have the potential to compete against multinational conglomerates. However, the irrational exuberance for Web-based business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) opportunities of the late 1990s is being tempered by the reality that enterprise applications require a sound architecture in order to provide reliability, scalability, performance, and security. To ensure viability in this network economy, companies are using technology to fundamentally change the way they do business. For example, technology is being used to:
Enhance communications through a distributed, connectionless network; providing access to information anywhere, anytime. Mobile computing solutions expand the reach of information by providing wireless solutions that utilize the same technologies and network.
Leverage existing technologies, making existing resources more productive and useful to an increased number of users. It is expensive to produce information—consider the time and effort involved in building a stock transfer or insurance processing system—yet providing an access wrapper into these proven systems is, relative to their total cost, fairly inexpensive. Thus reusing information in new contexts, rather than reimplementing, is a sound business decision. In fact, the wrapping of existing technology is proving to be a significant driver for the success of Web services.
Improve the visibility of information and data, opening new and existing sources of information to a larger population of customers, vendors, employees, and others. Static information can be quickly and easily updated while dynamic solutions can be delivered with minimal effort and programming resources.
Fulfill the promises of distributed computing with flexible, and easy-to-implement programming languages, tools, components, and interfaces. The complexity of building distributed systems, combined with compatibility issues between distributed models such as CORBA and DCOM, created high barriers to entry. Previous attempts at distributed computing tended to break down in heterogeneous environments. To address these issues, the industry has adopted Web services and, in the larger sense, a service-oriented architecture as the base distributed computing model. Combined with the power of the J2EE architecture, this distributed computing technology can be utilized to deliver flexible, high-performance, and standard solutions that can be easily changed to reflect new requirements and design needs.
Streamline and reengineer business processes to do business in ways never before imagined. Self-service applications have moved information closer to the end user and reduced administrative personnel. Electronic-commerce (e-commerce) transaction-based applications have increased marketplace competition and changed the way many companies present and sell goods and services. Internet technologies have lowered the barrier of entry for many start-up ventures and entrepreneurs; allowing them to compete with larger companies. The Web has equalized the playing field for businesses, making many small ones appear larger and many larger companies move like smaller businesses.
In this chapter, we will begin by looking at the motivations for enterprise application architectures and we will end by summarizing the focus of each chapter in this book. We will look at information technology (IT) issues, focusing on the process requirements of building enterprise solutions and look at what is needed overall to respond to competition, business pressures, and new requirements.