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Yefim Natis, Gartner vice president and research director |
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Goodbye to Monolithic Approaches to Software Infrastructures
Tuesday, 11 March 2003
Five years from now less than one-quarter of new software projects will depend on the traditional technologies of monolithic mainframe environments, or even basic three-tier architectures.
Instead, users and vendors of IT systems, over the next five years, will grow to understand and use a service oriented architecture (SOA). This will help them clarify design issues and make it easier to add to and extend applications. Developers will be able to integrate SOA applications more easily with heterogeneous, legacy and purchased applications. Using SOA, they will be able to develop applications with greater flexibility, scalability and reusability.
"The 40-year reign of monolithic architecture in mainstream software design will come to an end", says Yefim Natis, a Gartner vice president and research director. Speaking at Symposium/ITxpo 2003 in Florence, Italy, on Tuesday, Natis argued that "new large-scale application sets that are expected to have long life spans should begin to use SOA".
Leading systems engineers have actually been using SOA for more than a decade. But only now are companies embracing Web services, which are software components using at least one of three fundamental protocols:
Simple Object Access protocol (SOAP)
Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI)
As these open standards have spread, many vendors of middleware have begun to update their products in a way that starts to bring SOA to mainstream users.
As a result, Natis says a new category of software is emerging: application platform suites. As a minimum, such suites will consist of an application server, a portal product and an integration broker suite. They can also include other categories such as an integrating development framework and integrated systems management.
Application servers of today have inherited the functionality and architecture of many products, from online transaction processing, through distributed transaction processing and object request brokers to Web application servers. They will in turn give rise to application platform suites that will be an established market next year. By 2005, APS will have a profound impact on the software infrastructure market.
Users, however, should not expect software infrastructure products to coalesce into a single product. Suites will be the way of infrastructure design. They should not expect to eliminate homogeneity but rather enrich competing products.
To stay ahead, managers and developers need to embrace the vision of an APS that can enable a service-oriented architecture and join user interaction, transaction processing and application integration into a single unified platform and project effort. Such platforms will be essential to support an event-driven, real-time model of enterprise applications.
Jonathan Green-Armytage
Gartner Staff
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