Who needs enterprise architecture? You will, SAP customers will, everyone will.
Why? Take a look into the average IT department at any enterprise anywhere around the globe first thing tomorrow morning. What will you see? You will find X number of separate IT projects, each of which can be viewed as a discrete bucket. There will be lots of buckets for enterprise architecture software packages, and a chain of buckets for bespoke software development.
Sure, the size and number of buckets will vary by company, company politics and industry, but each bucket typically has a unique approach to software development, software integration, reporting and system management tools. Some could be SAP buckets, but many won't be.
When you look across those buckets tomorrow morning, you will find virtually no commonality of these tools or the skills needed to drive them. Why? It's just the way software is right now.
But over the next three years, this situation will change with the advent of the biggest technology shift to hit the software industry in a decade: service oriented architecture (SOA).
