The "four horsemen" of commoditisation - service oriented architecture (SOA), open source, software as a service and offshoring - will lead to cheaper prices and a radical change in enterprise software landscape of the future, according to analyst Forrester.
The Future of Enterprise Software report by Forrester predicts that over the next five years the industry will feature fewer larger IT suppliers than ever before, more pricing flexibility and declining prices.
But the change will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. While more than half of organisations are already making plans for introducing SOA, large enterprises are being held back by the weight of their IT legacies, which have grown dramatically in the past decade as they have adopted ERP, CRM and many other siloed software products.
