Gartner: Shorter projects a must

Integrators have been warned they will need to deliver faster solutions as business lifecycles continue to shorten.

Speaking at this year's Gartner Symposium in Sydney, keynote analysts said delivering early value to customers would be paramount and service orientated architectures (SOAs) would play a key role.

Gartner SOA specialist, Dion Wiggins, said the delivery of solutions needed to be broken up into shorter projects in order to deliver faster value. ERP implementations were a classic example of projects that took so long to deliver that customers often lost sight of what they were trying to achieve, he said.

Maturing standards in SOA and Web services enabled a loose coupling of discreet applications. These could be meshed together with new business process management (BPM) tools that would be Web-enabled with portal technology. Portals open applications up to a wider user base and add value to underlying applications.

An SOA umbrella independent of supplier would cover disparate systems that could include outsourced solutions as well as the myriad of typical in-house applications.

Pulling this all together would be the job of the developers, Gartner ERP analyst, Kristian Steenstrop, said.

A modest five per cent increase in IT spending for the coming year would add downward cost pressures across the industry, Gartner predicted.

Demand for lower network running costs would lead to the adoption of server consolidation technologies facilitated by intelligent virtualisation software, reducing manpower needed for hands-on maintenance.

Symposium director, Matt Boon, said the IT industry also needed to recognise that the IT market would be increasingly consumer driven.

"Consumers are driving the next wave of innovation and advances in technology," he said. "Soon, we'll be in a position where the majority of semiconductors will be going into consumer devices, disk drives and flash memory."