Three delivery trends are reorienting the way enterprise IT management leaders bring applications to market: Agile development, composite applications and cloud computing. These trends share a single, primary aim, and it isn’t just cost reduction. The chief objective of these initiatives is better, faster outcomes. All three seek to strip the latencies from traditional delivery and provide results that are more aligned with, and more responsive to, the business.

If your enterprise is like most, you’re probably pursuing all three. But are you doing so in concert? Pursued together, these trends present certain harmonies that significantly magnify their benefits.

Composite and cloud development prize the durability of services, ensuring that components perform well while remaining secure and resilient. Because both cloud and composite facilitate the exposure of services and subcomponents for use by other applications, their shared priority is for components to remain trustworthy in a variety of different contexts.

Agile and composite align in their aim for modularity. They resist large and change-resistant monoliths—whether in terms of project plans or application architectures—in favor of discrete, bounded units that can be built, tested and delivered to production quickly.

Agile and cloud overlap in the aim of responsiveness to change. Agile projects are designed to anticipate rather than resist change and to be able to pivot accordingly. The “always on” aspect of the cloud can facilitate this aim by reducing or eliminating the time to provision application environments, a key source of latency and inter-departmental squabbles.

Editor’s Note: Adapted from HP sponsored Application Note