The dot-com bubble and the subsequent downturn has not signalled the end of e-business opportunities in the country. But in fact it has ushered in the beginning of building appropriate tools and applications to bring e-business into every facet of business activity and everyday life. These are some of the trends that have been outlined in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) Technology Forecast 2002-2004, entitled, ‘Navig-ating the Future of Software.’ The forecast predicts the major areas of development for the next three years.

Roopen Roy, director of PwC India said, “Many companies felt the pain of the dot-com implosion, but the exuberance that marked the past few years left behind some very positive aspects that will help carve out the future of enterprise software.”

“The study has identified four major thrust areas—front-end Web services, utilisation of business intelligence, financial reporting and electronic business and security issues linked to disaster recovery, and business continuity applications,” said Ambarish Dasgupta, executive director of PwC.

The Technology Forecast explores the ongoing emphasis on inter-enterprise capabilities and other functional enhancement trends influencing the development of enterprise applications, including analytic capabilities, collaboration, mobility, portals, real-time computing and usability.

It also explores the ongoing evolution of enabling software technologies and provides predictions for three software architectures used to satisfy the technical requirements of enterprise applications, application integration, componentisation and Web services.
The next three years will see significant developments in portals that would serve as front-end tools for Web-based services like Net Banking and citizen-centric information kiosks.

In the next few years most Indian IT companies will spend on data warehousing as well as front and back-end applications. Moreover, several small and medium enterprises are expected to adopt the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in a phased manner, and use Web-enabled applications. The government and the PSU banks will be spending huge amount on back-end automation.

Dasgupta said one of the issues that PwC will highlight in this year’s technology seminar is XBRL (extensive business reporting language), the future language for all business reporting. XBRL’s standards will allow companies to report instantaneously in a standard term, using XML tags and international GAAP terminology to be generated on the Net. In the near future major ERP vendors will include the XBRL standard in their software, predict PwC officials.

The technology forecast also discusses the IT changes under way in enterprises and has divided it into three major sections, each highlighting a different area of enterprise software in areas of enterrise applications, commerce software and enabling technologies.