The principal challenge is therefore one of keeping up with the Internet's hyper-competitive pace while maintaining and leveraging the value of existing business systems. In this environment, timeliness is absolutely critical in gaining and maintaining a competitive edge. A number of factors can enhance or impede an organization's ability to deliver custom enterprise applications quickly, and to maximize their value over their lifetime. The ability to develop and deploy applications is key to success in the information economy. Applications need to go quickly from prototype to production, and to continue evolving even after they are deployed.
Productivity is thus vital to responsive application development.
Providing application development teams with standard means to access the services required by multitier applications, and standard ways to support a variety of clients, can contribute to both responsiveness and flexibility. One destabilizing factor in Internet and other distributed computing applications is the current divergence of technologies and programming models. With no single application model, it can be difficult for teams to communicate application requirements effectively and productively. As a result, the process of architecting applications becomes more complex. What's more, the skill sets required to integrate these technologies aren' t well organized for effective division of labor.