Are European companies ready for managing inter-enterprise business processes ?
The last years businesses have experienced processes and information exchanges becoming more and more integrated and inter-related. Globalisation of activities is pushing companies to implement collaborative solutions to support their inter-enterprise business processes.
The growing adoption of Service Oriented Architectures and the advent of Business Ecosystems requires companies to re-consider their core competences. Investments in building these kind of complex communication platforms are huge while innovation is going fast these days. A number of risks that most companies are not willing to take. Instead they will increase the continuing need to focus on core business processes and will try to outsource as much as possible non-business specific functionality.
While the dividing line between internal and external processes and business data is blurring there are best practices emerging based on innovative integration technologies. The concept of Open Source is driving innovation and transformation of ICT solutions through global collaboration where Open Standards play an important role in speeding up adoption. Making innovation work is one of the important aspect of strategic business development in the world of today.
In the coming years Open Source is going to dictate what tools Businesses are going to use to support and manage their business processes. At the same time the distinction between Business-to-Business Collaboration and Integration Platforms and ERP systems will vanish. Since these systems will emerge into Collaborative and Intelligent Process and Information Management Solutions. Modularity and componentisation will be the keywords and provide an answer to the question “How to implement these Digital Business Ecosystems and leverage investments in existing ERP and integration systems?”.
Especially in the integration world several Open Source oriented Companies are establishing modular component-based platforms that integrate easily with web based solutions such as Salesforce.com.
The questions in the near future are about global Business Process & Intelligence Platforms for managing (inter-) enterprise business processes ?
