Application infrastructure gets flexible

BANGALORE: Making their existing enterprise software applications move away from rigidly inflexible client/server architectures to nimble and highly responsive Web infrastructures, is the key driver for businesses today.
Application infrastructure is not what it was before. "Companies are now using IT to bring about rapid change within their organizations and achieve a breakthrough in efficiency and responsiveness because everyone realises that this is the only way to survive. Doing applications piecemeal without hitching everything onto a central database is passe," says Srikant Rao, country manager, BEA Systems India, the Indian arm of the BEA Systems Inc., a leading application infrastructure software company.
Everyone agrees that you need a tool which will enable a company to do all this - under one umbrella. Earlier this space was divided into pure play integration players (like Tibco, WebMethods and Vitria) or enterprise portal players (like Broadvision, Vignette, Hummingbird and Epiphony) or pure systems integrators. But now, it is the turn of the big league operators like IBM, BEA and Microsoft to play this space and begin to hog infrastructure space limelight.
Today, companies are not merely buying application servers from say, Oracle, HP or Sun. But, they are looking at full fledged integration vendors because that is where overall effieciency would come from. Interestingly, HP has scrapped its Bluestone too and now has a global tie-up with BEA on Java framework.
Echoing this trend of wanting a whole gamut of services and not just piecemeal kind of solutions, enterprise portals or EAI (enterprise application integrators) are not looking exactly healthy - either in business or stockmarket graphs.
According to Rao, India is also waking up to the call of application infrastructure deployment. "It is not just banking and financial institutions that are using this but also Indian railways for freight management besides other large organisations that are actually using this platform to build their own applications under one centralised holding," he added.