The End of Software -- as We Know It

In Calling all disruptors: the perfect storm of SOA, SaaS, and open source beckons, ZDNet's Joe McKendrick addresses the disruptive impact of the death of the monolithic application:

...[T]he combined SOA, Software as a Service, and open source movements will drive the software and application industry to highly modular, building-block, assemble-to-order approach -- similar to the disruption Dell incurred on the computer hardware business. Monolithic applications will go away, and replaced
with modular, loosely coupled components.



Will there be application "Dells" that will begin to eat the lunch of the SAPs and Oracles of the world? Stay tuned. The SOA/SaaS/open-source combination is a highly potent disruption force, and we ain’t seen nothing yet. As Winston Damarillo put it: "There are opportunities for commercial vendors -- as Dell did with hardware -- that create an assembly of components into a stack, manage the versions, and deliver it to the customer."

Recognition of this (dare I say it?) paradigm shift is important across the board -- and the boardroom. The transformation to highly modular IT solutions (and highly modular everything else) represents an opportunity for businesses -- regardless of size -- to adapt to an ever-changing global marketplace that will continue to be reshaped and redefined by the Long Tail, the Flat World, and the Wisdom of Crowds.