Are enterprise IT environments lacking behind the pace of changes happening in the consumer IT environment? Over the past years, the world of consumer IT changed drastically. Consumers manage nowadays the customization of their device through the installation of applications with a simple click from an application store. The ease of use has never been so great, resulting in a massive adoption by consumers. But, what about the easy of use in the delivery and exploitation of enterprise application?

On the one hand side we see the adoption of enterprise cloud services, where business applications are used as a service. Not all organizations are prepared for such services, or have constrains for the adoption of cloud services.

On the other hand, the standardization of IT is moving forward, which leads to the adoption of the appliances approach within enterprise IT environment. Network devices, such as switches and routers have been used for a long time. These were followed by data translation appliances and security appliances. Nowadays new appliances are launched, in particular in the area of data management and in the area of application management.

IBM announced a year ago the Integrated Expert Systems. These systems combine the flexibility of a general purpose system, the elasticity of cloud and the simplicity of an appliance. It has become truly a game changer in the way IT services can be delivered.

If we look to the area of application management then the traditional IT service delivery relies on long implementation cycles, as first the infrastructure and software needed to be procured, and thereafter started the process of assembling, installing, configuring, development, test, optimizing, etc. In many cases a process with many roadblocks caused by the wide variety of expertise required. During the entire project lifecycle are typically a wide variety of different skills required. Finding these skills is frequently a challenge and causes high costs, delays, errors, etc. The Integrated Expert Systems bundle (1) a pre-configured hardware configuration, (2) the portfolio of software licenses typically required for the application landscape, (3) all expertise gathered to manage the entire application lifecycle into a deployable format. The deployable format of expertise is bundled into what is called a ‘Patterns of Expertise’, which is the IBM equivalent to the open standard TOSCA patterns.

Enterprise business applications can be deployed, managed, configures, and optimized through the simple click of a button, as we are used to from our consumer experience with tablets and smart phones. The Integrated Expert Systems with patterns of expertise provide a huge business value: (1) they reducing complexity, (2) accelerate time to value, and (3) improve the IT economics. Using appliances for enterprise business applications is definitely a game changer in the enterprise IT environment, a trend started that has reached a point of no return.