The Web is moving on to a new era of openness, mobility, and digital business. The open Web is a platform built on HTTP (the fundamental web protocol), a new generation of HTML, dynamic languages, and wide use of Internet services for everything from video encoding to social graphs to order management and payments. The open Web made its debut in consumer applications; for enterprises, it will power a new generation of customer engagement applications. The open Web will be particularly important to app Internet systems that bridge mobile devices, cloud services, and enterprise applications and data. Forrester recently published a report that will equip application development and delivery leaders with an understanding of the open Web and its potential value.

We define the open Web as: a culture and community emphasizing openness, transparency, and freedom of developer choice as well as an application platform based on HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript clients, HTTP/representational state transfer (REST), and cloud services. The open Web includes the app Internet as one potential design pattern.

A new breed of developers is propelling the open Web: young developers who grew up on the Web and develop outside the firewall — primarily producing applications aimed at consumers. Their career expectations were also born of the Web, and they expect openness of information, technology, and expertise. Open Web developers share certain motivations that have shaped the open Web trend. They:

• Strive to create great customer experiences.
• Craft applications that can reach customers wherever they are.
• Leverage customers’ inherent desire to be social.
• Deliver applications and new functionality quickly.
• Minimize time spent on low-value tasks to focus more on creating business value.

I prepared this research with Rob Koplowitz.

The stage is set for a big upswing in custom application development on Microsoft SharePoint. First, SharePoint Server 2010 adoption is very strong, and this version of the product has the strongest features yet for custom development. Second, with application backlogs growing, many organizations will find themselves taking on SharePoint "customization" projects to meet business demands. Custom application development is the riskiest of the six SharePoint "workloads." For organizations adopting SharePoint, this situation demands a careful strategy now to avoid problems later. This post delivers our latest assessment of SharePoint adoption and discusses its implications for app delivery professionals.

Our latest survey on customer experiences with Microsoft SharePoint shows a successful product moving crisply through a major upgrade, from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) to SharePoint Server 2010. SharePoint usage is strong in organizations of all sizes and in most industry sectors. The product's continued success has two conflicting facets for application development and delivery pros:

• SharePoint can be a productive platform for business applications. SharePoint can help your teams deliver applications fast in three ways. First, with a little customization of the human interface, SharePoint's out-of-the-box applications can work for many situations. Second, SharePoint's basket of developer services for applications involving collaboration, social media, website creation, workflows, document management, information distribution, search, and reporting dashboards can speed completion of projects. Third, you can delegate simple sites and workflows, as well as content updating, to businesspeople.

[Forrester Principal Analyst Alexander Peters, PhD. and I collaborated on this research.]

You may have heard the term "business architect" in your travels; if you haven't, you soon will. A significant number of our clients are searching for these new leaders. Broadly, BAs are responsible for developing and managing an organization's business model and business technology (BT) agenda. The business architect fills the gap between business management and IT management. One way to bridge the gap is to make it someone's responsibility to do so.

In our research, we spoke to individuals occupying this crucial role in a large European agency, a large financial services firm, a regional healthcare provider, a diversified energy provider, and a logistics firm. The need for BAs is most acute in organizations that are in the midst of transforming their businesses and information systems.

The need for business architects is manifest, but what's less apparent to these firms is how this role should be structured, who should occupy it, and what a BA's responsibilities should be (as illustrated by wide variations in job ads for the position). In our research, we found two established models for the BA role:

• A new organization unifying process and project experts, promoted by the Business Architects Association.

• A new career path for enterprise architects.

After two years of vendor consolidation, which are the best business rules platforms for application development and delivery professionals to consider? In our judgment, based on growth rates, market presence, strength of product, and client interest, three vendors have risen to the leadership positions in this market, with two others coming on strong. IBM's ILOG has the strongest market position, but a surprising new alternative has gained strong initiative, and a one-time leader has lost momentum.

Although many application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals have experience implementing business rules platforms, Forrester's AD&D team has been receiving a continual flow of inquiries on this topic that suggests that clients want to know how the vendor landscape is changing and how those changes affect product choices. In fact, before evaluating a vendor's product features, clients consider the vendor's market momentum and the size of its customer base.

Our conclusion: The choices in business rules products have in fact changed, because the vendors have consolidated, expanded, and/or retrenched. Here is a picture of those changes:

As a result, the number of leading products has declined since we last evaluated business rules platforms. Some business rules vendors have expanded into other product categories. As a result, the decision to choose these vendors for a business rules product is more complex because business rules management is no longer their primary focus or their product sets include additional capabilities not directly related to business rules management. Within this category, there are:

Cloud computing will bring demand for elastic application platforms.

Promises that cloud computing can save money and reduce time-to-market by automatically scaling applications (either up or down) oversimplify what it takes to develop application architectures to achieve these benefits of elastic scaling. Few of today's business applications are designed for elastic scaling, and most of those few involve complex coding unfamiliar to most enterprise developers. A new generation of application platforms for elastic applications is arriving to help remove this barrier to realizing cloud's benefits. Elastic application platforms (EAPs) will reduce the art of elastic architectures to the science of a platform. 

EAPs provide tools, frameworks, and services that automate many of the more complex aspects of elasticity. These include all the runtime services needed to manage elastic applications, full instrumentation for monitoring workloads and maintaining agreed-upon service levels, cloud provisioning, and, as appropriate, metering and billing systems. EAPs will make it normal for enterprise developers to deliver elastic applications — something that is decidedly not the norm today.

Forrester defines an elastic application platform as:

An application platform that automates elasticity of application transactions, services, and data, delivering high availability and performance using elastic resources.

We see organizations moving toward EAPs by extending their current web architectures, following one or more of four paths: