Technology Challenges for the Global Real-Time Enterprise

Abstract

If there is one business concept that will drive distributed systems technology to the hilt in the coming years it is that of the real-time enterprise. The push for zero-latency access to a complete up-to-date view of all the business processes, inter-nally within a corporation, as well as to customers, will dominate the thinking of system architects for the years to come. Many of the technology components that need to become the building blocks for constructing and managing the real-time global information flow within large corporations do not exist yet. It is certain that issues such as security, robustness, manageability, combined with legacy system integration, and all enveloped with a scalability coating will be central in the dis-tributed system tools needed. It will require us to develop new technologies, re-package old ones, forge new tools and practices and to place these in an architec-tural vision in which many of these incompatible components can play together.

This research is funded in part by DARPA/AFRL-IFGA through grant F30602-99-1-0532 and in part by grants from the Microsoft Corporation.