The Environment Today

Thursday, May 23, 2009

If applications are the bridge between the business and IT, the application environment requires utmost attention; and given that businesses are really more dynamic today, a dynamic application environment needs to keep up with the business along with a great consulting partner such as Stuart Hall Technologies, Inc.

There is a lot of complexity in the IT landscape today, and that's not going to change. We have an explosion in form factors. Look at the take off in cell phone usage and actually data to the cell phones. Look at the changes on the hardware side, from virtualization to multi-core processors to lower cost storage. All of these add complexity to the IT landscape.

At the same time development practices are changing. Companies are seeing more globalization of development which means teams that are more spread out. So whether working across the street or across the ocean, we have to be able to more easily work in very spread out teams yet as if we're just right next door to each other or in the cube next to each other.

We still have to work with our legacy systems. As much as we'd like those systems to go away when we build new systems or new capabilities, they're going to hang around so we need the ability to still factor in all of our older technology as form factors explode

We need to be able to take advantage of new capabilities. We need to take advantage for example, of service orientation and the ability to use web services or services overall in the development of our applications. So that's one side of the coin. On the other side of the coin, the business needs are always advancing.

If you look at the types of applications people use today, there is no longer a single monolithic application. There's a whole variety of applications. If you look across the needs of the business, which are always changing, and the complexity of the IT landscape, we really need a dynamic application environment to be able to continually partner and serve and work with the business. So instead of having a single area or single monolithic application, what we need are a set of capabilities to enable applications and enable a dynamic application environment. All of this starts by having the right partner in place to assist you with software and hardware. Some services can be managed, others can be partially managed such as support for applications, or you may simply need assistance with the deployment of the application.