Well publicised transformation projects in this latest round of application renewal have made a point of calling out their organisations' desire to be first to market with more flexible and agile applications that would provide a competitive advantage against close rivals. It is this type of transformational activity that has seen vendors benefit too, in particular the ERP giant SAP whose local revenue grew during 2009 up by 10% YOY in June, while its parent’s revenue was falling at about a similar rate. Unfortunately, these early adopters may have locked in their choices too early when in late 2009 both IBM and Oracle announced their visions for what Longhaus called “next generation business applications”. These new applications, based on far richer and more extensive middleware offerings along with increasingly integrated information management capabilities drawn from their business intelligence acquisitions, represent a true threat to SAP.