Application Server/Framework Architecture

Several vendors have begun to redevelop their architecture so that they are aligned with one vendor's application framework such as Microsoft's BizTalk, or .NET platforms, BEA Systems, IBM's WebSphere, webMethods, TIBCO, and others.

BizTalk was Microsoft's first offering of a single structure that brings together business process automation (BPA), business-to-business (B2B) applications, and enterprise application integration (EAI) services. BizTalk also contains tools for developers and administrators, which have hooks into Microsoft operating systems, server platforms, and networking infrastructures. During the later part of 2000, Microsoft announced an expanded product offering called .NET. .NET Enterprise Servers are designed to aggregate and deliver Web services. Many of these servers, including the Windows 2000 Server Family, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and Microsoft Exchange 2000, are built in Extensible Markup Language (XML) at the core. XML ensures that structured data will be uniform and independent of applications or vendors, which makes it ideal as a foundation for integrating Web services.

During the next few years, we will likely see several other CRM vendors align themselves with an application server/framework vendor. The development cost is getting too high for CRM vendors to develop all of the components in-house.