The evolution of open source products has mirrored the evolution of commercially available products. As operating systems matured, Linux evolved. As relational databases matured, MySQL evolved. As application servers matured, jboss evolved. We are about to see a similar pattern with the enterprise application space. Enterprise Applications are now, for the most part, feature complete. Over the past few years, most of the innovation in this space has been in different deployment models, such as web-based and Java-based applications, and not so much in terms of end-user functionality. At the same time, these products are still large, complex, and expensive to implement. Almost paradoxically, these applications still do not fit the needs of many businesses. The application functionality provided is often too generic, and requires significant customization or business process reengineering before it can be implemented. The customization itself then generates even more expense due to the need to maintain it and react to new product versions from the vendors.

Two major industry trends will dramatically change this over the next few years. First, enterprise application development tools are increasing in sophistication to the point where the cost of implementing many of these application features is rapidly reducing. Since the generic application functionality is already well understood, this means that it is now feasible to implement open source enterprise applications. These open source applications can be used as templates to create applications tuned for specific business needs. There is still a customization and maintenance cost involved, but the base application costs nothing.

Second, tools to provide easy configurability are currently under development in many companies. These tools include metadata repositories, extension mechanisms, business process design and management tools, and easy to use business editors that put this configurability into the hands of business users, not IT developers. This means that the cost of implementation and maintenance goes down considerably. Some companies are even taking this model to its logical endpoint - hosting the application so that there is no IT involvement needed at all.