Extensible Enterprise

There has been an increasing demand for enterprise applications to be more adaptive to the needs of the market and customer expectations. Many times these expectations are a result of direct competition but also due to the fact the business strategies undergo a change (read mergers, acquisitions and takeovers). While building a product it is crucial to understand this requirement and factor it into the overall architecture. The sad story as of today in most companies is the fact that these are never thought as a requirement or get retrofitted in the existing model with some amount of plumbing in the need of hour. While this achieves the purpose, it may prove to be the limiting factor in the long term. So what are these requirements:
  1. Enterprise applications need to define extensibility points in the overall design
  2. They need to define integration points with external applications to provide a seamless end user experience
  3. They need to be architected such that services are provided on the product at a much lower cost and without huge upgrade costs.
  4. Once the above have been defined, it is important to architect them as plug and play components, the plugins themselves being managed by the enterprise application's package manager. Many extensible applications such as wordpress, Sugar CRM follow this model and have achieved success.

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