The data revealed that many of us are upgrading our applications infrastructures. The survey results reported in this article reveal a similar pattern with investments in applications suites.

A survey conducted by Cutter Consortium revealed that 74% of respondents are firmly committed to e-business as a key part of their corporate strategies. 1

In this article, I want to consider the kinds of off-the-shelf (OTS) packages, software development tools, and technologies that our respondents are using to develop e-business applications.

What began as a trickle is turning into a torrent.... Global sourcing is a hot topic in executive suites throughout the US and Europe. Driven by our increasingly globalized economy, IT services are following the lead of industries such as manufacturing and agriculture in their shift to less expensive geographic locales.

What began as a trickle is turning into a torrent.... Global sourcing is a hot topic in executive suites throughout the US and Europe. Driven by our increasingly globalized economy, IT services are following the lead of industries such as manufacturing and agriculture in their shift to less expensive geographic locales.

Not long ago, I received a call from the CFO of a Fortune 500 company about to write a check for $30 million for a network and systems management framework.

Not long ago, I received a call from the CFO of a Fortune 500 company about to write a check for $30 million for a network and systems management framework.

The accompanying Executive Report resets the digital revolution in the context of business and technology progress. We're at a flashpoint: the pace of technology deployment and business velocity has already outstripped our ability to assess its impact on how we live, produce, and distribute.

The accompanying Executive Report resets the digital revolution in the context of business and technology progress. We're at a flashpoint: the pace of technology deployment and business velocity has already outstripped our ability to assess its impact on how we live, produce, and distribute.

Organizations are bursting with information and knowledge these days. For each, the challenge is to harness all this know-how and make it available to everyone throughout the organization. Today, there are myriad learning gems available for the taking; coupled with the Internet, the resources are boundless.

IT offers a major source of competitive advantage in almost all industries. Companies rely on technology to reduce internal inefficiencies, connect to external partners (suppliers, clients, and distributors), and implement business models that sometimes transform the rules of the game in their market space.

IT offers a major source of competitive advantage in almost all industries. Companies rely on technology to reduce internal inefficiencies, connect to external partners (suppliers, clients, and distributors), and implement business models that sometimes transform the rules of the game in their market space.

Editor's Note: This report addresses component and application architectures in detail and builds on the discussion covered in the author's previously published report, "Making Components Work" (see Cutter Consortium Distributed Enterprise Architecture Executive Report, Vol. 4, No. 9).

The accompanying Executive Report details two of the key architectures necessary for efficient and productive application development: component architecture and application architecture.1

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

-- Elphonse KarrLes Guê Pes, 1849

Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

-- George SantayanaThe Life of Reason, 1905

One of these things is not like the others.

-- Big BirdSesame Street

The Object Management Group (OMG) began developing CORBA in 1989. The idea was that organizations would be moving to object and component technologies and that everyone would be better off if they had a common, open standard to use when they wanted to link together objects or components on different platforms.

It's no secret that insurance companies are big IT spenders. Larger insurers have been consistently spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year on software alone. For some time, insurers have been focusing the vast majority of their technology spending in two areas: computing infrastructure and business process automation.

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the purposeful and coordinated monitoring of your competitor(s), wherever and whomever they may be, within a specific marketplace. Your competitors are those firms that you consider rivals and with whom you compete for market share. CI also involves determining what your rivals are planning to do before they do it.