83% of IT projects fail in one way or another (over budget and late for instance.) Today, the SeeBeyond folks gave a demo and overview to the software executive staff. They had a number of statistics they referenced:

– 100 new IT projects started every hour
– 31% of all IT projects cancelled
– 53% of projects late and 189% of budget on average
– Resulting in an estimated $140B/year in extra cost

Source: The Standish Group’s Chaos Report.

I don’t know about you, but I find those figures shocking. That after 40 years of concentrated effort around IT we don’t have a better success rate than 17% makes me wonder why businesses invest….but I digress.

On the brighter side, the SeeBeyond acquisition brought significantly more to the table than I appreciated. The concept of composite application brings significant business opportunity to the table for Sun and potentially, could help address the problems contributing to the rotten metrics enumerated above.

I’m particularly pleased that the CNS Sun Connection Architecture will easily adapt and in fact, thrive in the world of the composite app. Now, we’ve all got to get busy making sure we specify, design, plan, build, test, deploy, and operate them in an efficient manner. No small challenge.