Packaged applications are increasingly under fire for their failure to quickly deliver tangible business benefits, their constrained ability to adapt to changing business conditions, high implementation failure rates and high maintenance costs once the application is finally in production. This is all about to change with the ongoing industry shift toward hosted applications, which present a straightforward solution to the problems of packaged applications. Themselves a radical improvement from the in-house applications previously typically developed by enterprises for internal use, packaged applications are now becoming an endangered species threatened by a similar paradigm shift toward the hosted application delivery model, which is more adaptive, scalable, safe and financially sound.

Just like with in-house and packaged applications, hosted solutions stand to benefit from a common platform, which allows to aggregate common infrastructure functions and then make them available to a number of applications to benefit from. Applications developers can thus focus on application logic rather than worrying about various low-level technical issues, like data persistence, scalability and high availability.

Current application platforms address the needs of in-house and packaged applications, but they do not recognize additional value they can bring to hosted applications. Further, to accelerate the adoption of hosted software delivery model, many more hosted applications in varying niches must become available on the market, which requires that smaller vendors be able to enter the marketplace with large numbers of niche solutions. Their unique needs can be addressed through a common hosted applications platform, breaking the barriers that are holding back fresh wave of innovation in business applications.

This new breed of application software will be accessible on demand from any place in the world, presenting unified access to the user's network-resident data and business capabilities. It will be inherently interoperable with other users' in-house and hosted software, finally recognizing the unrealized benefits of combining pure business logic with universal application-to-application communications. And it will unleash a new world of possibilities for developers, who will be able to rapidly deploy their latest features to all of their users worldwide, simplify front-office logistics and focus on responding to their market needs.