Developments in Oracle and SAP's application servers, as well as advances in IBM and BEA's products, have expanded application servers way beyond their beginnings as a Java development platform, said Derek Prior, research director at analyst firm AMR.
SAP's announcement this month that it would build an application platform based on a service oriented architecture high- lighted this trend, Prior added.
"SAP has shown that you need all the surrounding integration technologies - application integration, data hubs and content management. These things that were previously separate need to be joined together."
SAP's forthcoming Enterprise Service Architecture will allow firms to start with a graphical representation of their business processes, and use web services language BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) to orchestrate previously built processes.
