The New Jersey Institute for Trustworthy Enterprise Software was founded in 2001 as a result of a grant from the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology.

There are several htmlects to the changing face of software, and its role in the national economy, that justify the establishment of this institute.  The first and most visible htmlect is the growing reliance of the economy on transactions conducted over the Internet and the Web.  This includes both business-to-consumer transactions and business-to-business and intrabusiness commerce.  Inter-enterprise and intra-enterprise electronic business have the potential to radically overhaul the means of distribution underlying the economy on a scale rarely seen in history.

Another htmlect of the changing world is the increasing use of component technology, moving software development away from the classic model of "build from scratch" to a more economical model of "reuse where possible."  In this "new" model of software development, configuration of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) packages may play as important a role in software development as the classical "programming from scratch."  This is reflected in various frameworks that are being proposed as standards for component technology, including OMG CORBA, Microsoft COM and ActiveX Controls, Java Beans and Jini, and Microsoft .NET.  It is also reflected in a growing use of formalisms for describing and prototyping configurations of object-based systems, particularly the Unified Modelling Language (UML).

A final htmlect of this changing world is the growing importance of software as part of the commercial product, rather than a "back-room" phenomenon that did not directly impact the customer.  This is most visible currently in the growing use of the Web for sales and distribution.  There have already been some spectacular failures of Web-based enterprises because of poor software, and it is recognized that more and more the commercial survival of enterprises will depend on secure and reliable software underpinning their activities and their interactions with customers and partners.