There are also lots of start-ups with their own angle on real-time computing. KnowNow software allows users to build publish-and-subscribe services delivered over the Internet. Bang Networks has developed technology to update information on web pages continuously. Kenamea's products, among other things, speed up web-based applications.
Horses for Courses
But how will people work with all these integrated systems? The "user interface" of the real-time enterprise will come in different shapes and sizes, depending on the role of the employee and the device concerned. For service technicians it might be nothing more than a display on a pager that tells them where to drive next. For office workers it will probably be an "enterprise portal", giving personalised access to corporate information and applications. And senior managers will have their "digital dashboards", showing them in real time how their business is doing.
Software experts are already speculating about the way corporate IT systems will look in 20 years' time, when the "legacy" systems (the term used for old applications) will, with luck, have disappeared and EAI vendors will be history. In all probability, corporate IT will by then have become amazingly lightweight. Companies won't need much more than a "real-time manager", to use a term coined by Thomas Berquist, an analyst with Goldman Sachs. Everything else could be outsourced via web services, except perhaps a few core applications. And firms will be able to tap into many more data sources in future.
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