In 1837, when Charles Babbage dreamed up his famous Analytical Engine (and in doing so created what is widely acknowledged to be the first general-purpose, fully programmable, automatic mechanical computer), I wonder if he dared imagine what the world of the “program” would evolve into some 180 years later.

Assisted by the ingenuity of one Ada Lovelace (widely recognized as the first computer programmer) and the undeniable genius of Alan Turing, Babbage had helped lay the foundation for much of today’s modern computing paradigm.

From the evolution of his early idea to the creation of early business machines and on to the mass production of the devices that are found on the desks or in the hands of today’s global workforce, the principle that computers require programs to function still remains true.

Today, due to their ubiquitous nature, we tend to think of programs, applications or apps as one and the same. At the highest abstraction, these are a collection of instructions that perform a specific task or tasks when executed by a computer. Simple. Applications power global economies and simplify our everyday lives. Without them, there would certainly be less efficiency, less productivity and, unimaginably, no Microsoft Word, Netflix or Amazon!

Many established businesses have long and complex histories of deploying different types of applications. Some of these have been developed in-house, some purchased via independent software vendors (ISV), some deployed to physical desktops, some virtualized, some designed as client-server, some designed as n-tier web. Yet almost all are intended to bring efficiency and effectiveness to core business processes.

The evolution of applications has witnessed many significant paradigms shift as the underlying technologies have enabled new architectures and, in turn, new commercial and delivery models.

Today’s enterprise CIO is faced with a growing challenge: how to manage an application portfolio that is, by its very definition, a hybrid one and must meet two sets of business demands. First, the existing (or traditional) applications must continue to be available, managed and regularly updated. Second, the demand for new applications — usually requested by business owners — must be addressed, with those applications quickly on-boarded and seamlessly integrated into the enterprise estate.

Adding to this challenge are the rapid rise and adoption of software as a service (SaaS) and the demand for end users to access their applications, both new and existing, from any device at any time.