Market Description
Enterprises run enterprise applications to manage and automate their innate value-creation process. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are the most prominent, but there are also customer relationship management (CRM), human resource management (HCM), supply chain management (SCM), and supplier relationship management (SRM) systems. All of these enterprise applications share three challenges that CxOs face:
1. Enterprise applications need to be integrated. No enterprise systems run in isolation, and they need to be integrated with other enterprise systems.
2. Enterprise applications need to be extended. No enterprise systems have a 100% fit out of the box, so they need to be extended to fit an enterprise’s automation needs.
3. Enterprise applications require brand-new automation to be built. In select but often strategic cases, enterprises need brand-new automation to run their strategic processes, and that automation must be built.
The above processes are the three generic use cases that define the enterprise application platform (EAP) category: Integrate, Extend, and Build. Although all three generic use cases can be built with stand-alone development tools, CxOs prefer offerings for these from their enterprise automation vendors. In terms of building seamlessly integrated applications at all levels of the technology stack (from user experience [UX] all the way to storage), easier licensing and availability make EAPs very strong contenders for these use cases. Practically, an EAP is the platform as a service (PaaS) of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor.
The strategic importance of EAPs only increased in recent quarters, as CxOs began charting their enterprise’s artificial intelligence (AI) plans and implementations. Naturally, they have looked at the EAP of their enterprise vendors to provide these capabilities; the result of this demand is that every enterprise software vendor offers its new AI capabilities via its EAP. This means that the value of an EAP for an enterprise has practically moved from strategic to indispensable: Key data, AI models, AI implementation, testing, and monitoring are all new EAP capabilities that enterprise systems vendors are rushing to market and that enterprises are keen to adopt.
