Business process will remain the key driver for enterprise application initiatives in the next year and will play an instrumental role in several technology areas. In addition, businesses will rely on enterprise architectures, such as ESB and SOA, to integrate applications and processes, such as ERP and order and fulfillment. To follow this split, we've decided to divide our business applications coverage into two pieces--enterprise applications and application infrastructure.
In 2006, we'll continue to look at products emerging in the ESP (enterprise service platform) arena, such as BEA Systems' Liquid Data for WebLogic, Microsoft's Project Green and Oracle's Fusion. We'll dig into conventional enterprise applications, including CRM and ERP (enterprise resource planning), and explore how the Web and acquisitions have affected the growth of both application sets. Finally, we'll investigate new enterprise standard applications, such as repositories, that foment the growth of SOAs.
