Managing Borderless Applications

As application frameworks on the Web continue to evolve, it’s becoming clear that managing applications that are essentially becoming borderless is going to be one of the next great IT challenges.

With more Web applications than ever becoming integrated with any number of other applications on the Web via proprietary and standard application programming interfaces, the ability to manage these applications end-to-end is beyond the scope of most IT organizations.

Nevertheless, these next-generation applications are continuing to proliferate because in many instances the decision to integrate various Web applications is made with little to no input from the IT department, even though the ultimately responsibility for managing these applications will be dumped in the laps of IT.

Kristen Allmacher, solutions marketing manager for Compuware, says the advent of borderless applications is one of the primary factors that drove the merger of Compuware and Gomez. Over time, customers are going to need to manage not only highly integrated sets of Web applications, but also internal applications that those external-facing Web applications are connected with.

It may take a while for this new application management framework to completely play itself out within most IT organizations. But successfully managing it will require IT organizations to reevaluate their entire approach to application management.