The Hindu : PwC forecasts bright future for e-business

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 19, 2002

Business

Business

PwC forecasts bright future for e-business

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI APRIL 18. The future of e-business remains bright despite the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Rather than the end, this is just the beginning of e-business and the continual evolution of enterprise applications and enabling software has not slowed with the economy. This is the assessment of the last annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Technology Forecast - 2002-04, entitled "Navigating the Future of Software.''

The study shows that with the gold rush over, the information technology industry is going back to work and refocusing on building the tools and infrastructure needed to push e-business further into every facet of business activity and every day life.

The PwC executive director, Rajarshi Sengupta, says that the dot-com implosion left behind some positive aspects that will help carve out the future of enterprise software. The addition of inter-enterprise capabilities has been the major factor influencing the development of corporate applications during the past few years. And the future will see increasing sophistication of these capabilities as vendors release their next generation of e-business enabled applications leading to significant changes in the software industry.

The technology forecast says that unlike many other technology areas, forecasting the future of software is difficult to do with any degree of accuracy. For instance, semiconductors and computer hardware move in incremental steps towards well-defined, agreed upon goals, growing denser, smaller and faster. In contrast, the software world is characterised by a low degree of certainty about the speed and direction of progress. But according to the forecast, certain identifiable trends carried over from the dot-com boom will lend a sense of direction to an industry marked by creativity and innvoation.

The forecast also explores the evolution of enabling software technologies and provides predictions for three software architectures used to satisfy the technical requirements of enterprise applications — application integration, omponentisation and web services.

Possibly the greatest challenge facing large organisations today, it is stated, in use of IT is application integration. It is also felt that realisation of the web services vision will not be likely during the three year forecast period especially because the concept assumes that companies will be willing to do business with new and unfamiliar business partners. Instead, web services are more likely to be used during the forecast period for integration between trusted business partners and for integrating applications within an enterprise.

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