Applications drive differentiation. Today’s era of business transformation is driven by explosive technological innovation, in which we are seeing a proliferation of applications and application providers. During the past decade, while the number of their transformations—increasingly embracing cloud providers has consolidated, the number the multiplatform world by choosing of applications for the average large enterprise applications with niche capabilities from a has increased. Of the companies we surveyed, variety of partners. a majority of large enterprises used more than Exhibiting this, in the past two years 69 percent 500 applications from almost as many of organizations have increased the number of vendors. Take marketing, for example: application vendors they use, and 81 expect to Marketing activity has moved from offline and 53x mass media to online and social media in the add more.3 We have seen this trend increase past decade. over time, as businesses have shifted away the number of enterprise technology from just enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors that cater to marketing has Each new application represents an integration and toward multicloud capabilities. 2 grown from 150 to 8,000, a 53x increase. opportunity for organizations to differentiate But companies today face an imperative: to and address evolving industry needs. create an integrated network effect that Organizations are indeed already starting to multiplies the value of their many technologies. capitalize on the abundance of choice to drive Composing for agility in the era of compressed transformation 3