Industry feels the pinch for transformation
Reviewing sales or RFPs is not always the only way to check the pulse of the market. A subtle way to check the trends in the market is to look at the employment opportunities or jobs on offer in the market. In recent months there is a growing demand for hiring enterprise architects in many Fortune 500 companies. These firms are specifically looking for capability in assessing and driving large IT transformation or modernization across multiple applications.
The drivers for this are the obvious
- growing consumer demand for online and consequently, the near real-time services that need to be provided
- cost optimization across systems built over the years and the demand to track ROI,
- build systems that are inter-operable and flexible in line with SOA and EDA architectures and finally
- better data quality and Master Data Management across customers, products and operations which in turn build good business intelligence and reporting capability.
As the need for architecture is growing, we might see some interesting consolidation among the vendors whose tools form a baseline and reference for such large programs. IBMs acquisition of Rational was only the beginning, followed by Telelogic acquiring Popkin in 2005 and IBM acquiring Telelogic. We will see some more coming soon as conventional strategy or infrastructure players enter the application transformation space.
Comments
Looking at this and the overall business scenario , one is brought to notice the increased number of acquisitions happening virtually in every business domain whether it is IT or telecom or steel or auto... Does this point to the rise of economic superpowers that will eventually lead to trade wars. Is this the start of a new wave where businesses instead of companies will be waging wars against each other ?
Will future generations read about say a MICROSOFT having its own fleet of cyber warriors who will attack Say a Google or YAHOO infra ? !
Posted by: Pankaj Bagzai | May 27, 2008 09:26 AM
Product side acquisitions are done primarily to address a market or solution gap in a current offering which in turn reduces the buying cycle time. Industry side acquisition is primarily done to acquire clients and hence revenue and market share. The World Economic Forum, WTO and OECD are amongst several organizations that create a balance for globalization – or at least attempt to.
There is a definite race already for client acquisition through innovative service definitions especially on the SaaS side both for the corporations and individuals. Examples being hosted email, file servers, bulk print services etc to reduce the operating cost on non exclusive systems. The war will continue to be on price point, features and SLA; not by attacking another organizations infrastructure which is an offence in many countries.
Posted by: Sohrab Kakalia | May 28, 2008 03:51 AM
Sohrab,
Interesting points on transformation. And yes, the tip on market intelligence by reviewing jobs on offer is certainly an indicator. It seems that organizations are looking to beef up their internal capabilities, perhaps an indicator of increasing demand and EA job postings.
I would love to hear you expand on the positioning of in-house vs. consultants when it comes to Enterprise Architects.
Posted by: Mohan Babu K | May 28, 2008 02:00 PM
@ Mohan,
Sure. In fact, I am planning my next EA article on the topic of "In source or out source EA disciplines?" A question many organizations are asking and a fiery topic too.
Posted by: Sohrab Kakalia | May 29, 2008 03:57 AM
These activities were the domain of the CIO some time ago. As projects grew in size and number, project portfolio managers came in the picture along with application portfolio managers, and now we need people who can see the complete picture and also give direction to the entire IT landscape, and also provide cost benefits :-) Welcome Enterprise Architects!!
Posted by: Nirmala Desai | June 5, 2008 01:05 PM