Seven Pillars of Architecture

The next-generation architecture is made up of the following seven key elements.

1 Reusable software components. Application software will continue to grow away from the monolithic, hard-to-maintain masses of code we've known in the past toward smaller components that communicate with each other to complete particular tasks. Generic and company-specific elements can be mixed and matched without undermining the overall design. Instead of exchanging data using brittle application program interfaces, applications will exchange standard documents such as orders and invoices and extract the data they need behind the firewall. Enabling technology: Object-oriented software. Object-oriented design tools and execution environments, such as Microsoft's Visual Studio, will replace traditional development and run-time environments with comprehensive programming, testing and operating environments, and manage large libraries of code. Non-profit organisations including the insurance industry's Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development, as well as software vendors such as customer management provider Chordiant Software, are building document and process objects that are understandable within industries and functions. Another consortium, XML Common Business Library, is working on a standard for XML documents that cross industries.

We will finally overcome the long-standing limitations of object-oriented tools' performance, functionality and critical mass of users. The solution is coming in part from the rapid increase in computing power of both servers and client devices to fuel the added processor requirements of the object-based approach, and in part from major commitments by leading software vendors to build robust development tools and run-time environments. Principally, the big vendor battle is between Microsoft, with its largely proprietary .Net Web services, and IBM's on-demand computing platform based on Linux and Websphere open systems.

Who will win? IBM is betting heavily on the open architecture of Linux, which has fans in the developer community. Microsoft is targeting the installed base of Windows users, hoping to bring them onto the next-generation platform gradually. For now, both companies need to do a better job of making the business case from the customer's point of view, especially those already under pressure to reduce IT spending growth and focus on short-term productivity gains.

Key impact: Software development becomes a cottage industry. Users will buy software in pieces - some from traditional application and systems software vendors and others from companies specialising in particular business functions, for example, credit scoring or industry-specific legal compliance. Companies will also write their own modules for activities in which they already enjoy a competitive advantage, eliminating the painful and unsatisfying make-or-buy dichotomy of today's environment. Open-source enthusiasts, both at the system and application software level, will accelerate the spread of reusable and extendible code. 2 Openness. To maximise companies' abilities to collaborate both inside and outside the organisation, we will build software and networks on open standards for process, data, user interface and, most important, information exchange.

Enabling technology: Standards. In addition to the next generation of existing Internet standards, including XML, open architectures will play a dominant role for lower-level operating systems, such as Linux, as well as higher-level application-to-application interaction. Over time, application vendors will build on emerging standards to create higher-level rules for interchangeable business documents and processes for managing them. Industry and vendor consortia such as the Web Services-Interoperability Organisation (WS-I), supported by BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft and others, as well as the Universal Business Language promoted by Commerce One, SAP, Sun and others are vying to create the winning combination of standards and applications. Each group has a slightly different definition of openness, but all the participants understand that they can sell new products and services to users only when collaboration across the supply chain becomes cheap and standardised.