Software systems are more important to businesses than ever before. This is because a firm that has made massive investments in computer software development, as most large firms have, currently needs more skills in order to maintain its operations than at any other point in computing history. This is due in part to the fact that most enterprise IT systems are based off of relatively expensive and established legacy tech. On top of the legacy tech, which the firm has laid as an IT foundation, there can be anywhere from a few years to decades of newer systems and flexible modernized technologies built on top to ensure sustainability. These additions to the base system can take the form of large proprietary solutions such as those from Microsoft or Oracle, any number of entirely open source solutions, or software that is created in house. A idea’s time to market is brief and a company can not sit back and wait as competitors to take a lead. An IT solution has to maintain the balancing act of keeping the proven tech alive while adding new or more flexible features. Let's take a look at a hypothetical example.
A large firm that deals in a high volume of financial transactions perhaps has customer data running through a mainframe that has been active for years. A mainframe cannot afford much downtime. In all likelihood the mainframe will be managed with some variant of Unix. However on top of the system there could be auditing software or an entire complex application for dealing with transactions and must maintain countless records to keep up with regulations or service level agreements. Many third party vendors, such as Axway, fill this niche, and often have their own languages, development tools, and may offer dedicated support personnel. Some of these tools may use libraries that are written in a language such as C that is more commonly found in the worlds of embedded programming and avionics. Furthermore managers, operators and analysts may have to make decisions based on data in the system. This necessitates front-end development. These front ends and accompanying back ends can be written with the aid of such technologies as J2EE, .NET ColdFusion, and many other frameworks.
As you can see, the day-to-day operation of a business solution such as this require expertise in technologies that range from over 40+ years and may be well-known only to one vendor. Yet a company must be able to locate people who can troubleshoot and innovate in all crucial technologies.
