Notes on the technology supporting packaged application software
This is part of a three-post series on enterprise application software over the decades, meant to serve as background to a DBMS2 post on issues in enterprise apps.
- The first lays out very general issues in understanding and subdividing this multi-faceted sector.
- The second calls out characteristics of specific application areas.
- The third (this one) discusses application software products’ underlying technology.
0. I’d like to discuss the technology underneath packaged application software. To create some hope of the discussion being coherent, let’s split apps into a few categories:
- Major/core suite, large enterprises — e.g. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning).
- Major/core suite, smaller enterprises — e.g., the province of Progress and Intersystems VARs (Value-Added Resellers).
- Remarkably distributed applications. This is where a lot of the more unusual technology choices cluster.
- Other point solutions. Sometimes, a guy just needs a catch-all category. 🙂
1. The idea of bundling ERP (or its predecessor MRP) with an underlying DBMS has been around for a long time.
- Cullinet and Cincom tried it, but with pre-relational DBMS. Oops.
- Oracle has always had that strategy.
- A sizable minority of SAP’s customers ran
And for smaller enterprises, it has been the norm, not the exception.
| Categories: Application software, Cullinet, Database management systems, IBM, Informix, Microsoft, Oracle, Pre-relational era, SAP, Sybase | 4 Comments |
Enterprise application software — vertical and departmental markets
This is part of a three-post series on enterprise application software over the decades, meant to serve as background to a DBMS2 post on issues in enterprise apps.
- The first lays out very general issues in understanding and subdividing this multi-faceted sector.
- The second (this one) calls out characteristics of specific application areas.
- The third discusses application software products’ underlying technology.
1. When I started as an analyst in 1981, manufacturers seemed to still be over 40% of the IT market. For them, the distinction between “cross-industry” and “vertical market” application software wasn’t necessarily clear. Indeed, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) can be said to have grown out of the combination of MRP and accounting software, although it never was a manufacturing-specific industry category. ERP also quickly co-opted what was briefly its own separate category, namely SCM (Supply Chain Management) software.
2. Manufacturing aside, other important early vertical markets were banking, insurance and health care. It is no coincidence that these are highly regulated industries; regulations often gave a lot of clarity as to how software should or shouldn’t work. Indeed, the original application software package category was probably general ledger, and the original general ledger packages were probably for banks rather than cross-industry.
| Categories: Application software, Pre-relational era | 8 Comments |
Enterprise application software — generalities
This is part of a three-post series on enterprise application software over the decades, meant to serve as background to a DBMS2 post on issues in enterprise apps.
- The first (this one) lays out very general issues in understanding and subdividing this multi-faceted sector.
- The second calls out characteristics of specific application areas.
- The third discusses application software products’ underlying technology.
1. There can actually be significant disagreement as to what is or isn’t an enterprise application. I tend to favor definitions that restrict the category to (usually) server software, which manages transactions, customer interactions, financial records and things like that. Some other definitions are even more expansive, including personal productivity software such as Microsoft Office, computer-aided engineering systems and the like.
2. Historically, application software has existed mainly to record and route information, commonly from people to machines and back. Indeed, one could say that applications are characterized by (up to) five (overlapping) aspects, which may be abbreviated as:
- Database design.
- Workflow/business process.
- User interface.
- Social/collaboration.
- Analytics.
The first four of those five items fit into my “record and route information” framework.
| Categories: Application software, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP | 6 Comments |