"The only paradigm shift that we had to accommodate was the move to an agile methodology for doing all our development, because this requires the whole business to be in sync and work very closely with the IT team," he said.

He also warned of the inflexible nature of proprietary solutions that he said focused too much on consolidation and not enough on "being the right fit".

"In the commercial space, we are seeing more and more products become one. But for enterprise architecture, applications that are cohesive and easily coupled is much better than consolidation," he said. "It's all about using the right kind of components to fit into the different layers of the application."