Why Use Application Platforms?
A successful business strategy uses the IT infrastructure to provide competitive advantage for the organization.
Strategic IT investments are the ones your organization does with the goal of being the first to do something or provide a certain service to your customers.
In other words, strategic IT investments are the ones that help you to differentiate yourself from others.
When all your organization does is to catch up with other business competitors, you're doing utility IT investments.
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Both types of investments are very important for any organization.
Utility IT investments are usually linked to the purchase and implementation of packaged software while strategic IT investments are linked to custom application development.
Traditionally, organizations have been focusing their IT strategies and investments around individual technologies and platforms like operating systems, data management solutions, ERP solutions, CRM solutions, and many more.
In the past few years it became quite obvious that this approach ends up in disconnected investments and independent silos of functions that are, at best, hard to integrate.
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A successful Application Platform must provide support for both phases:
The STRATEGIC phase – you will usually deal with current technologies (sometimes even cutting edge ones) because the main goal is to differentiate, to be the first in doing something
The UTILITY phase – you seek long-term stability, optimized TCO (total cost of ownership), predictability
Most (if not all) modern application platforms rely on four key parts:
- The foundation (Operating System + local services to support applications)
- Development Tools
- Infrastructure Services (integration, identity, storage, …)
- Application Services (services exposed by the applications themselves, a paradigm commonly referred as Service Oriented Architectures)