Present day enterprises are comprised of thousands of applications. Many of them are commercial, off-the-shelf applications; some of them are in-house applications, and some others are legacy applications that have been part of the enterprise for a very long time. Though there will be thousands of applications, it is impossible for employees to access each one of them separately using separate consoles.

Why are so many applications required in an enterprise? The answer to that question is that each enterprise has thousands of business functions that are impossible to be performed by a single application. Even an application such as an ERP can do very limited functions when compared to the actual needs of the enterprise.

Another reason for multiple applications is that spreading various functions across multiple applications ensures a better level...