2009 is thankfully behind us and its time to turn our attention to 2010 in ernest. Every year at this time teams of analysts all over IDC get together and produce top ten predictions documents in their coverage areas. My group, Software Business Solutions is no exception, we're putting the finishing touches on our document this weekend. I have a joint breakfast briefing with Henry Morris and Steve Hendrick this Tuesday, 1/26 to highlight predictions from the 3 major WW IDC software groups. Contributing to the predictions from my group: Mary Wardley, Albert Pang, Amy Konary, Robert Mahowald, Sanjeev Pal, Darren Bibby, Steve White, Virginia Agee, Mira Perry and Caroline Dangson.
I'm not going to share the whole document in this post, if you want that you'll have to check it out on the IDC site (should be up in a week or so), but I do want to share the predictions that we came up with this year. From a trends perspective the predictions theme is the "new normal" and they fell into a few buckets; social business, mobile, next gen apps / cloud and lasting change. Here are our predictions:
1. The social business movement gains momentum through the cultural shift that is enabled by social enabled applications that are formed from the intersection of collaboration, content, search, communities, CRM and the current web 2.0 tools like blogs, wiki’s, microblogs, etc. with 50%+ of the Fortune 500 initiating social business projects this year.
2. Software vendors, recognizing that "one size does not fit all" with partner programs, will move to an a-la-carte benefit structure versus a long list of perks with diluted value.
3. The great divide will come to an end between horizontal and vertical applications for the enterprise.
4. As a fundamental part of the Social Business transformation businesses shift their focus from technology and process to people, who in effect become the new enterprise platform.
5. Cloud infrastructure computing moves squarely into the mainstream as a significant number of the Fortune 1000 companies adopt the utility computing model demonstrated by moving a portion of their “sandbox” apps into production on public clouds.
6. In response to a productivity spike, VARs, SIs and ISVs will turn in force to contracting (virtual staffing) and partnering. Vendor programs will adapt to support these new models.
7. "There's an app for that": Mobile becomes the new enterprise desktop with more than 50% of US workers accessing applications via a mobile device.
8. The 'new normal' will give rise to increased end-user buying power causing extreme pressure on existing vendors to mold offerings and giving opportunity to aggressive suppliers.
9. A software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7B decline in WW new license revenues in 2010.
10. Cloudsourcing becomes a major alternative for companies looking to outsource non-core business processes (software-in-a-service).
So there you have it, what other predictions did we miss for enterprise applications and their vendors and partners?
