Social and mobile and cloud – where enterprise applications are going
There is a new world order in Silicon Valley, and by extrapolation, the world of technology. Out are Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and in are Facebook, Zynga, Groupon. The question is: if I am in the enterprise applications space what is the next big thing after Salesforce.com ?
I see three areas of innovation:
(1) Social: with everyone jumping on the Facebook bandwagon, there will be a way to make applications more social. How is this going to happen? I don’t know but I can guess the following
- your work will include more and easier collaboration
- traditional e-mail will disappear and be replaced by concepts such as “Like”, “Recommend” etc.
- sharing will become more common
- the boundry between employee and non-employee will disappear
(2) Mobile: this is the easy one. One will be able to do their work using just a mobile phone. So, the PC disappeared a while ago and very soon the laptop will disappear. Will it be replaced by a tablet (e.g. iPad) or a smartphone?
(3) Cloud: this is an interesting one, because I feel that we are very early in the lifycycle of cloud computing. I predict the following
- the data center as we know it will disappear
- instead you will find cloud centers!
- storage will be a hot area
- there will be a whole new category of Fedex-types of companies that “deliver anywhere” using cloud-based services
Are you ready for all this innovation? Hope you are as optimistic about these trends as I am. We will soon welcome a new class of billionaires …. you could be one of them. How exciting!
