Essential Technologies for Innovative Enterprise Software Development in 2025

“I’m more concerned about not being bold enough than about being too cautious.” – that’s how McKinsey, quoting an anonymous CEO, decided to summarize its publication “The CIO agenda for the next 12 months: Six make-or-break priorities”. After conversations with dozens of CIOs and CEOs, McKinsey concluded that enterprise-level companies are looking for technology to be a dynamic force in their business. To successfully carry out digital acceleration in 2025, executives need to factor in knowledge from top experts and considering important trends related to enterprise software development. Here are some key factors to keep in mind.

Why is enterprise resource planning (ERP) so important?

The ERP market is expected to grow significantly, from $81.15 billion in 2024 to $238.79 billion by 2032. This growth is driven by increasing business complexity, global operational demands, regulatory pressures, and changing customer expectations. Modern ERP information systems now function as the intelligent and dynamic core of the enterprise, crucial for orchestrating data and processes across a complex digital landscape.  

Key developments in enterprise resource planning technologies include: 

• Composable and cloud-native architecture: The traditional monolithic ERP systems are becoming outdated. Today’s top solutions are composable, enabling businesses to choose the best modules for their needs, such as finance, HR, and supply chain management, and to integrate them seamlessly using APIs. Primarily offered through SaaS models, these systems provide greater flexibility and scalability without the challenges associated with on-premise infrastructure. 

• Embedded AI and hyperautomation: Artificial intelligence is no longer a bolt-on feature but woven into the ERP fabric. This includes AI-driven demand forecasting, predictive maintenance alerts in manufacturing, and hyperautomation of routine financial processes like invoice matching, freeing human capital for more strategic tasks. 

• The ERP as a central data hub: The true power of ERP systems in today’s information landscape lies in their ability to integrate various functions. Modern ERPs act as the central nervous system, bringing together data from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, e-commerce platforms, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It is essential to have strong data governance and open APIs to ensure the ERP provides a reliable, single source of truth supporting the entire enterprise technology stack. 

Digital Immune Systems will improve customer experience

A while ago, Gartner named Digital Immune Systems (DIS) the Top Strategic Technology Trend. As Gartner’s experts explain, a Digital Immune System combines practices and technologies for software design, development, operations and analytics to mitigate business risks. A DIS is a set of technologies and best practices ranging from software development, product design to automation and business analytics, holistically working together to reduce system failures that impact business performance and deliver the best possible user experience (UX) along the way.   

“Enterprises face unprecedented challenges in ensuring resilient operating environments, accelerated digital delivery and the reliable end-user experience,” expresses Joachim Herschmann, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner. “The business expects to have the ability to react to market changes quickly and innovate at a fast rate.” A Digital Immune System can help enterprises recover more quickly from failures by strengthening their resilience Research shows that by 2025, companies investing in building digital immunity will improve customer satisfaction by reducing downtime by 80%. 

Generative AI

Almost half of the respondents (48%) in a Gartner survey said that improving customer experience (CX) was the primary objective of digital investments. As long as DIS is in place, CX will not be compromised by defects, system failures, or irregularities, such as software bugs or security threats. In the process, DIS provides enterprises and IT stakeholders with significant business value. 

What is necessary to establish a healthy Digital Immune System?

Gartner mentions six practices and technologies crucial for establishing DIS in enterprises:  

Observability – building solutions with embedded analytics tools needed to provide the necessary data about a system and its users,  

AI-augmented testing – making testing, maintenance and analysis fully automated,  

Chaos engineering – using experimental testing to find exploits and vulnerabilities in a system,  

Auto–remediation – developing a system capable of self-monitoring and self-correcting, if necessary, by detecting and fixing issues, 

Site reliability engineering (SRE) – setting up engineering principles and techniques to enhance CX by controlling service management, 

Software supply chain security – handling the risk of software supply chain attacks by implementing control policies, protecting code integrity and enforcing trusted repositories. 

Making a Digital Immune System a part of a company is directly connected to implementing solutions that ensure you can keep complex digital systems running even when they are compromised. Artificial Intelligence can be a helpful ally in this endeavor. 

In 2024, tech executives and companies should be aware of the additional trend of eco-friendly development. It is important to implement sustainable software development practices and the use of green technologies to reduce environmental impact.

Read more: What is enterprise app development?

The importance of enterprise application integration

Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the process that includes technologies and methods to enable automated information exchange between enterprise applications. As AWS states, it removes data siloses, creates process efficiencies, reduces IT expenditure and provides real-time data access. 

The foundation of modern Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is API-led connectivity. APIs act as universal contracts, enabling applications to communicate in a standardized and secure manner. Instead of relying on a single, cumbersome Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to manage all traffic, today’s architecture is decentralized. API Gateways manage secure access and traffic to specific services, while event-driven platforms like Apache Kafka provide an asynchronous data backbone. This decouples applications, ensuring that a failure in one system does not disrupt the entire business process, thus enhancing resilience and scalability. 

Integration Platform further accelerates this new approach as a Service (iPaaS) solution. Cloud-native platforms from providers like MuleSoft, Boomi, and WSO2 offer extensive libraries of pre-built connectors and low-code tools, making integration more accessible. Ultimately, EAI in 2025 will not revolve around purchasing a single software solution. Instead, it will be a strategic and composable approach – selecting the right tools for each task to create a truly agile, responsive, and interconnected enterprise. 

Cloud solutions and SaaS platforms in the enterprise world

According to IDG analysis, companies can offload complex infrastructure management by shifting from legacy on-premise hardware to sophisticated cloud environments and focus on driving core business value. What trends are considered to be the most crucial?  

• Leveraging world-class infrastructure: When you move to the cloud, you are building on the world’s most advanced, secure, and resilient infrastructure. Cloud providers offer a level of performance, uptime, and security that is nearly impossible for most companies to replicate in-house, ensuring your operations are stable and scalable on demand. 

• Data-driven decisions with Cloud (Enterprise Resource Planning) ERP: Modern cloud ERPs are the nerve center for intelligent business operations. A Microsoft Dynamics ERP system, for example, provides a unified view of finance, manufacturing, and supply chain data. This allows for real-time performance tracking, improved forecasting, and more resilient supply chain management, turning business data into a competitive advantage. 

• Accelerating innovation with PaaS: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings have become critical hubs for business innovation. For instance, the SAP business technology platform enables companies to build and extend custom applications on top of their core SAP enterprise application software. This empowers teams to develop new tools that enhance customer experiences quickly, automate unique workflows, or unlock new revenue streams without disrupting core processes. 

• Boosting efficiency with SaaS: Adopting SaaS enterprise solutions drastically reduces IT overhead. It eliminates the need to manage, patch, and upgrade on-premise servers. With automatic updates and maintenance taken care of by the provider, your IT teams are relieved of routine tasks and can concentrate on strategic initiatives that contribute directly to business growth.

AI in enterprises – what leaders need to remember

In the latest edition of its ”Annual State of AI in the Enterprise“ report, Deloitte indicates that xcompanies need to realize the value of artificial intelligence and unleash its potential to drive new opportunities for businesses, employees and society. To give even more context and perspective – 94% of business leaders surveyed agree that AI is critical to success over the next five years. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that 79% of leaders surveyed by Deloitte conveyed full-scale deployment for three or more types of AI applications – up from 62% last year. 

Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done, as an enterprise embarking on an AI-fueled odyssey must be ready to face challenges like choosing the right AI technology and integrating it with different internal systems. Additionally, ensuring executive-level commitment, providing real business value instead of generating noise and truly integrating AI into organization’s culture and workflow are essential.  

As artificial intelligence is entering a new era in enterprises, the “Annual State of AI in the Enterprise” recommends four actions leaders in every organization willing to implement AI efforts should consider. 

Investing in culture and leadership – managers should do more to channel the optimism surrounding the culture change in the current workforce and accelerate business strategies with AI. 

Transforming operations – everyday enterprise operations need to be rethought to create and deploy AI ethically at a large scale.   

Orchestrating tech and talent – AI strategies should be based on an organization’s available human or pre-packaged skills. 

Selecting use cases that can help accelerate value – when choosing use cases to advance your company’s AI journey, focus on the value drivers for your business, as reflected by your sector’s trends and customers’ expectations.  

AI is fueling another business revolution  

According to Gartner’s Top Technology Trends for 2025 agentic AI will play a crucial role in upcoming years, acting as virtual workforce assisting humans, offload and augmenting the work of traditional applications. Generative AI still being an important part of the whole equation.  

“GenAI is acting as a catalyst for the expansion of AI in the enterprise,” said Leinar Ramos, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner. “This creates a window of opportunity for AI leaders, but also a test on whether they will be able to capitalize on this moment and deliver value at scale.”

What challenges are companies facing? A Gartner survey found that 49% of participants consider estimating and proving the value of AI projects as the main obstacle to AI adoption. This issue is more significant than talent shortages, technical difficulties, data-related problems, lack of business alignment, and trust in AI, highlighting its critical nature.

What can be done to solve that roadblock?  “Organizations who are struggling to derive business value from AI can learn from mature AI organizations,” said Ramos. “These are organizations that are applying AI more widely across different business units and processes, deploying many more use cases that stay longer in production.”

Open-source solutions in modern enterprise software development 

Modern enterprise software development relies heavily on open-source solutions. By utilizing open-source projects, businesses can avoid vendor lock-in and create more flexible, robust systems. 

Open-source solutions are containerization and orchestration at the heart of modern enterprise architecture. Kubernetes remains the undisputed leader for managing complex, scalable workloads, with Docker as its foundational container runtime. This combination provides the de facto standard for deploying and managing cloud-native applications. 

For data, PostgreSQL continues its dominance as the premier open-source relational database, lauded for its robustness and rich feature set, making it a viable alternative to costly commercial options. In the NoSQL realm, MongoDB leads for flexible document storage, while Redis is essential for high-performance in-memory caching. 

The world of open source ESB products has evolved into sophisticated integration platforms. Apache Camel remains a robust framework for integration logic, while comprehensive platforms like WSO2 provide robust API management, integration, and identity access management for connecting disparate systems. It’s important to note the significance of mature open-source enterprise applications.  

Some platforms excel by providing a comprehensive suite of integrated business management tools, including CRM, e-commerce, accounting, and manufacturing solutions. In 2025, the strategic advantage will be the intelligent assembly of these open-source components to create a resilient and innovative enterprise. 

Intelligent enterprises are looking to expand their talent pools

Forbes named the talent challenge of the biggest challenges companies are facing. New ways to approach work, like remote or hybrid working, are pivoting workplaces, and enabling new solutions and ways to cooperate in the process. In-house teams working solely in an office is a relic of the past – as Forbes believes we will soon deal with the birth of a new era of “intelligent enterprises”.” What’s behind this term? It describes organizations able to combine innovative ways of remote work and cooperation, while still achieving every set of Key Performance Indicators.   


However, the virtue of being an “intelligent enterprise” is not enough when facing a talent challenge. The last two years have forced top companies to modify their approach to employees by providing them with flexible working hours, new opportunities and the ability to grow and learn. Monolithic enterprise company culture, intact for years, if not decades, is undergoing a shift to resolve talent shortages.       

Fueled by digital transformations, workplace culture change will directly influence enterprise software solutions development. Redesigning existing architectures and implementing agile, more efficient solutions will be a vast undertaking. Developing custom enterprise software without an external software partner with industry-specific experience and a mindset compatible with an intelligent company could be either impossible or, at best, too resource intensive. 

Enterprise green tech: The basics

As enterprise technology becomes more powerful, its environmental footprint grows. The massive energy consumption of data centers and the escalating problem of e-waste are no longer sideline issues but core business challenges. However, the tech industry is uniquely positioned to innovate its way to sustainability. Enterprises can significantly reduce their negative environmental impact by embedding green practices into technology development. Key areas of focus include: 

• Energy-efficient data centers: Data centers are the backbone of modern enterprises, but are known for their high energy consumption. To create more sustainable solutions, companies can use renewable energy sources, implement advanced liquid cooling systems to reduce power usage for cooling (measured by Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE), and leverage artificial intelligence to optimize workloads and energy consumption in real-time. 

• Tackling e-waste with a circular economy: The continuous cycle of hardware upgrades generates large amounts of electronic waste. Adopting a circular economy approach is essential. This involves designing hardware for longevity and ease of repair, promoting hardware-as-a-service (HaaS) models, and partnering with certified recyclers for responsible disposal at the end of the product’s life. 

• Sustainable software engineering: Software also has a carbon footprint. Green coding practices prioritize writing efficient algorithms that require less processing power. This practice can significantly reduce energy demand across thousands or millions of devices and servers. 

Innovations in enterprises require the right tech and people

 According to Gartner’s latest forecast, global IT spending is projected to reach $5.43 trillion by 2025, reflecting a 7.9% increase from 2024. 

Teaming up with an experienced and skilled software partner is the fastest way to accelerate your business needs. If you want to learn more about this kind of cooperation, or discuss your situation, use the contact button below – our experts are happy to help you find the best solutions. 

FAQ

What is enterprise software and its examples?

Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software (EAS), is computer software designed to meet the needs of an organization rather than individual users. Enterprise software is designed to integrate and manage complex business processes across various departments, including finance, human resources, and sales. Its primary goal is to enhance efficiency, improve productivity, and streamline operations on a large scale. This type of software is typically robust, scalable, and capable of handling significant volumes of data and transactions, supporting mission-critical functions within a company. Many examples of enterprise software cover a range of business functions. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, such as SAP ERP and Oracle NetSuite, provide a centralized platform for managing core business activities. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, like Salesforce and HubSpot, facilitates the management of interactions with current and potential customers. Additionally, Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems oversee the flow of goods and services. Other common examples of enterprise software include business intelligence tools, marketing automation software, and human resource management systems, all designed to support the complex needs of large organizations.

What are three types of enterprise software?

Enterprise software is broadly categorized to manage and integrate various business processes. One primary type is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, which acts as a central hub for an organization. It combines core business functions such as finance, human resources, manufacturing, and supply chain into a unified system. This integration allows for streamlined processes and data sharing across different departments. Another significant category is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. CRM systems mainly manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal is to improve business relationships with customers, assist in customer retention, and drive sales growth. These systems compile customer information from various channels, including the company’s website, telephone, email, and social media. The third key type is Supply Chain Management (SCM) software. This software is specifically designed to manage the flow of goods, data, and finances associated with a product or service, from the procurement of raw materials to the delivery of the final product. SCM systems assist companies in reducing excess inventory, shortening the time it takes for products to reach the market, and effectively managing the complexities of their supplier and logistics networks.

What is meant by enterprise technology?

Enterprise technology encompasses all the hardware, software, and systems organizations use to support their large-scale operations. Unlike consumer technology, which is designed for individual use, enterprise technology is specifically developed to meet the complex needs of businesses. Its purpose is to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and promote department collaboration. This technology forms the core IT infrastructure necessary for managing large volumes of data, automating workflows, and executing essential business functions securely and reliably. It is vital for resource management, customer interaction, and making informed, data-driven decisions in a competitive environment. This ecosystem includes everything from the physical servers and networking hardware in a data center to sophisticated software applications. For instance, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems integrate functions like finance and human resources, while Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software manages client interactions. It also encompasses cloud computing services, cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive information, and business intelligence tools for data analysis. Ultimately, enterprise technology is the integrated technological framework that underpins a modern organization’s ability to operate, innovate, and grow in a scalable and efficient manner.

What are enterprise software companies?

Enterprise technology refers to the comprehensive suite of hardware, software, and systems that organizations utilize to support their large-scale operations. Unlike consumer technology designed for individual use, enterprise technology is engineered for the complex needs of a business, aiming to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and foster collaboration across departments. It forms the core IT infrastructure that enables a company to manage vast amounts of data, automate workflows, and execute its core business functions securely and reliably. This technological foundation is crucial for managing resources, interacting with customers, and making informed, data-driven decisions in a competitive landscape. This ecosystem encompasses everything from the physical servers and networking hardware in a data center to sophisticated software applications. For example, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems integrate finance and human resources functions, while CRM software manages client interactions. It also includes cloud computing services, cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive information, and business intelligence tools for data analysis. Ultimately, enterprise technology serves as the integrated technological framework that supports a modern organization’s ability to operate, innovate, and grow scalable and efficiently.