While making chips, engineers use a emulator to simulate the chip’s working in software. It would be good to have something similar for enterprise software. What we need is a software system to simulate the enterprise and its ecosystem. It is almost like a video game, a kind-of “Sim Enterpri-City”. A software company can then “inject” its software into the system and see how it performs.
Today, we test software at the sub-system level. But, it is very difficult to get a feel of how it would perform in the enterprise world. When I read about Nvidia testing its chips at emulators from IKos costing USD 4.5 million, it struck me that what we probably need is an “emergent system” of enterprises which can simulate the behaviour of companies and thus create a testbed for new software. Maybe, later, just as video games have gotten closer to reality, this could even be used to test-market ideas and advertising campaigns!
