Empowering enterprises through next-generation enterprise computing

Enterprise computing is concerned with exploiting interconnected computers to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of larger companies. Such companies form business organizations that manage various sorts of information, used by disparate groups of people, who are situated at different geographical locations. This motivates the use of computer-based information systems, not only to reduce costs and increase productivity, but also to enable novel business models. As a result of the importance of enterprise computing to business organizations, information systems have been massively deployed. In order to cope with legacy and heterogeneity problems and consequently with lack of interoperability, considerable research efforts have been spent on integration of otherwise isolated systems ̶ either within the scope of a single organization or across organizational boundaries. This has spawned a number of important developments, including Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business Process Management (BPM), Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi), and, more recently, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this editorial we reflect on current and future enterprise computing developments that would further empower enterprises. We do this inspired by the articles in this special issue, which are revised versions of selected best papers of the 13th IEEE International EDOC Conference (EDOC 2009), “The Enterprise Computing Conference‿, held on 1-4 September 2009 in Auckland, New Zealand. In addition, we discuss a new technology-driven paradigm that may have considerable impact on enterprise computing and hence on the future of enterprises.