There's a lot of conversation these days about IT's role in a concept referred to as sustainability of the business. The basic argument is that a business needs to more aware of all the contingency threats to its business outside the four walls of the enterprise. That means that it needs to be aware of the implications of everything from the sudden loss of key supplier, how dependent it is on access to energy and even how big the company's overall carbon footprint is.
The fact that any business can be affected by this issues isn't particularly new. But the clarion call that is being made today is that IT systems should be able to provide business leaders with an instant assessment of any given threat to the company's business. As always, there are multiple approaches to doing this that are going to sound pretty familiar to many IT veterans.
Not surprisingly, SAP has taken a leading role in promoting the sustainability issue because it argue the best way to get the visibility needed to really sustain a business is to deploy SAP application software end-to-end across the enterprise. As the argument goes, the inherent integration of various SAP applications will make it a lot easier for business executives to determine the dependencies that might adversely affect the business unless some sort of contingency plan is put in place.
Naturally, there are those that say the SAP approach to sustainability isn't, well, sustainable. Middleware providers such as OpenPages argue that customers need a data driven approach to sustainability rather than an approach that requires them to engage in a series of expensive application upgrades. They argue that there is far too much value in the myriad of best-of-breed applications that make up any enterprise today to justify throwing away those investments in the name of sustainability. Instead, they argue that what is required is a relatively lightweight set of middleware infrastructure that will make it easier for customers to service the data they need to inform any sustainability effort.
Of course, there is a third camp in the sustainability debate that has yet to be heard from. A few software-as-a-service software vendors, such as SPS Commerce, are making the case that the use of a software-as-a-service approach to sustainability is a more effective approach because it is easier for the suppliers, distributors and partners that make up an extended enterprise to share data across a single multi-tenant software-as-a-service offering. SPS Commerce today offers a software-as-a-service offering largely targeted at retailers and the makers of consumer products goods but it is not hard to see how this concept could be applied to sustainability efforts across any number of vertical markets.
This argument between providers of enterprise applications, middleware and software-as-a-service provider is nothing new under the sun. It's been going on to one degree or another for the past 20 years. But what is happening is what was once purely a technological debate is now becoming a bigger business issue so don't be surprised to increasingly seeing business executives weighing in this debate in the name of business sustainability.