Information Technology Reference
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ity that technical developments have brought to businesses. The PC era put mean-
ingful computing capability on the desktop. This drove a change from mainframe-
based monolithic data centers to business processes that empowered the end user.
An inventory report was no longer something that arrived once a month. Business
users now had the capability to get business information they needed, when they
needed it. This capability profoundly changed the speed of business, and more im-
portantly, the speed in which business decisions were made. Departments such as
sales, engineering, and finance now had visibility to each other's vital data. This led
to efficiencies in business and ultimately higher profits and customer satisfaction.
This flexibility in the business domain during the client-server period soon extended
to the consumer with the advent of the Internet. Consumers could now interact dir-
ectly with businesses, which enabled a completely new dimension of customer cent-
ricity. Business users saw a delayed benefit of the Internet. The need to be intercon-
nected outside the organization evolved with the advent of concepts, such as
Ser-
vice Oriented Architecture
(
SOA
). This introduced business-process flexibility as
well as business-process delegation. A need for business-process orchestration was
realized.
The advent of elastic computing based on cloud-based computing models has cre-
ated entirely new possibilities for businesses. Now, entire applications and their in-
trinsic functionalities are made available on demand, and can scale to business
needs. This has opened up new avenues of doing business as well as business
models that have never been seen before. Applications have started to evolve to em-
brace this new approach, and Oracle Fusion Applications is one such example.
The following diagram visualizes the evolution of computing paradigms and their im-
pact on businesses. It shows how applications evolved along with changing business
models. It provides an overlay with the functionality that was inherent within those
applications.
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