Busting down silos is nothing new to anybody who’s suffered through 1990s-style re-engineerings. The goal of these efforts was eliminating the waste and duplication that occur when organizations are composed of dedicated units. For instance, if you want to cross-sell new products to existing customers, it’s hard to do that when each product has its own sales organization.
The same can be said with software. Large enterprises are likely to have multiple ERPs, CRMs, and back end databases. There’s also functional duplication or multiple APIs even within single applications. And if you’re a large middleware vendor, you’ll probably have multiple mechanisms for integrating applications, processes, or data.
With the emergence of SOAs, it’s become thinkable to tie bits and pieces from the same system, or disparate systems, together into so-called composite applications. You can use third party tools, like business process management systems to tie things together, or you can buy prepackaged composite apps, like SAP’s xApps.
