Enterprise Software - Getting Archaic?

With advent of Web 2.0, we are seeing an evolution in Information technology. As the web turning out to be a platform, Applications are being more agile, thin & continuously evolving. The usage patter of IT is slowly but steadily shifting from being Enterprise driven to be more consumer driven. The days of huge custom built enterprise software, with a whole lot of speculative design seems to be passée.

Now some facts to corroborate my hypothesis..

The Global IP traffic data (In a recently published report by Cisco), makes an interesting revelation – the Consumer IP traffic has been growing at 58% CAGR since 2005 and expected to surpass Enterprise IP traffic by end of 2008. Also it’s predicted that Consumer IP traffic will reach 1.5 times the Enterprise IP traffic by year 2011.

As Douglas Merrill (Former CIO Google) put’s it “Fifteen years ago, enterprise technology was of higher quality and consumer technology. That’s not true anymore. It used to be that you need enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security and speed. None of these are as good in Enterprise software any more as they are in some consumer software”

In the age of globalization, more and more employees are on move. Enterprise IT for people constantly on move is a costly affair and not always easy to use. Further the cost of maintaining huge data centres and with a large number of in house IT staff is adversely impacting the bottom-line of large enterprises. More and more large enterprises are realizing that apart from a few key business processes, rest all IT requirements doesn’t need large enterprise applications, rather they can be delivered to users over the internet as Consumer IT by Software as Service (SaaS) offerings / smart applications on mobile devices procured by other organizations.

Let’s looks at some of the technology trends, which can eventually replace majority of Enterprise IT spending

- Data centers moving to SaaS model with use of Cloud computing
- Improved storage/ computing capabilities of mobile handset
- Web as a platform - Market leader Google - Spreadsheets, word processors etc
- Cloud Computing - examples
o Amazon.Com – Simple Storage Service (S3) – Provides a simple web service interface which can be used to store/ retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere.
o Amazon.com – Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - Provides resizable computing capacity in the cloud, with users paying only for capacity they actually use

Hence it's time for Enterprise architects to revisit the technology stack and to see how we all can go lean..any thoughts?