Succeeding in Enterprise Development

Delivering competitive advantage demands innovation
Until now, component-based multi-tier Enterprise development has been risky
Borland C++Builder 4 takes the risk out of Enterprise development

Delivering competitive advantage demands innovation

In the last few years the IT department has come out of the wings to take center stage in implementing the corporate strategy. In all industry sectors, rapid information integration and delivery to customers, partners, and staff is becoming increasingly important. For example, Financial organizations are competing to deliver the best possible research online to attract new investors. In the merger-crazed telecommunications market, organizations are looking for ways to rapidly integrate diverse IT architectures to deliver a single unified face to the customer.

In an online world, the competition is just a click away. Innovative solutions for aggregating, managing, and delivering information are required to retain customers, and take business from the competition.

Innovation involves stepping ahead of the pack and using new techniques and technologies before the competition does.

Today's most successful companies are innovating in IT.

Until now, component-based multi-tier Enterprise development has been risky

So how can organizations build innovative applications that are not just 'one-shot wonders,' but can be enhanced on an iterative basis to meet the perpetually changing business needs of the enterprise and its customers? The general consensus is that multi-tier or distributed component-based applications are the key to solving many of the integration and deployment problems that are facing the Enterprise today.

COM and CORBA are the predominant distributed component strategies. While COM prevails on Microsoft-based desktops and severs, CORBA is important for deployment and compatibility in heterogeneous environments.

Until now, there have been a number of risks associated with distributed component development:

• COM and CORBA are exclusive and competing standards. Most organizations will probably need to support both, leading to increased costs in technology, development staff, and application maintenance.
• Developing COM and CORBA applications is extremely difficult to learn and then tedious to manage and change. Until now, high-productivity C++ Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools (especially for the development of CORBA applications) have not been available to radically simplify distributed development.
• Organizations have huge amounts of code and skills invested in C++. Until now, rapidly developing CORBA applications has meant using a different language or tool, leading to increased costs and under-utilized skills, code, and experience.

Multi-tier component development (using COM or CORBA) is essential for responding quickly to business requirements but until now, developing these applications has been expensive and risky.

Borland C++Builder 4 takes the risk out of Enterprise development

Borland C++Builder 4 delivers a number of innovations that maximize the success of distributed application development by eliminating many of the problems currently faced by developers, project leaders, and IT Directors.

This paper explains how by using Borland C++Builder 4, organizations can:

• Rapidly develop both COM and CORBA applications that respond quickly to business needs.
• Make the best use of their existing C++ code, skills, and experience to rapidly deliver highly sophisticated and robust solutions.

Borland C++Builder 4 is the key to distributed application development success.