An application landscape is the structure and/or coherent set of information systems, services, business objects, modules, functionalities, building blocks, applications, system components, interfaces and databases and their platforms, technologies, types and interdependencies, with regards to business continuity. An application landscape can be created to represent the current state of affairs, also known as the current application and integration landscape, or a future state depicting a target application and integration landscape required to support business requirements and demand down the road. Both the current and future state are required to understand the gaps between where you are today with your application environment and where you need to go based on business requirements, corporate goals & objectives, and IT drivers.
IT Architects provides a service to develop current & future state application and integration landscape scenarios. This is typically represented by creating a formal schematic visualization of an application landscape called an Application Landscape Diagram. ArchiMate and Dragon1 are examples of modeling languages with which an application landscape can be visualized formally in a diagram while capturing application metadata, although drawing tools such as Visio can also be used for presentation purposes.
