This post marks Virtusa’s fiftieth blog posting.  Starting in April of 2010, Virtusan’s have offered their insights into a wide variety of technology issues, trends and business challenges.  It seems fitting that our half century mark should come at the end of calendar year 2010.

The year 2010 saw the arrival of the mobile app as an indisputable force to be reckoned with.  With iPhone and Android app stores carrying hundreds of thousands of applications each, there is no denying that apps have arrived.  As we watch new mobile devices, new social sites, and slick new apps being released with blinding speed we are quite possibly witnessing an inflection point in human history.  Consider this time the dawn of the true technology era.  Like the Italian Renaissance, we have our artists and visionaries.  Instead of Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Galileo in Italy we have Gates, Jobs, Berners-Lee, Metcalf, Joy, Torvalds, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox PARC and Silicon Valley.  One hundred years from now historians may look back at this time and declare this period of time the start of the technology revolution.  Star Wars and Matrix are our Mona Lisa and statue of David?  Scary.

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Last week’s ITxpo Symposium in Cannes drew more than three thousand attendees, over half of which were senior level IT executives.  The conference agenda offered insights into future trends in typical Gartner fashion – high impact, broad sweeping trends combined with business imperatives.  There were three themes that were repeated many times – application retirement, a new era of enterprise application and innovation.. (more…)

In recent months there has been a noticeable resurgence in the need for Business Architecture at both tactical and strategic levels. In my experience, there are many Enterprise Architects (EA’s) thinking about Business Architecture, but very few who are really doing Business Architecture.

The Standish Group, an IT research organisation, documents this annually and has historically found that 31.1% projects are cancelled before completion, 52.7% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimated cost and only 16% of projects are completed on-time and on-budget. (more…)