This post is built from our annual IDC group effort to lay out ten predictions. The actual document should be up on IDC.com in a couple of weeks, for those of you who have a subscription anyway, so if you want to learn more about any of the predictions I'd point you there, it has a lot more detail than this post. The team this year (besides me) includes: Erin Traudt, Mary Wardley, Scott Guinn, Robert Mahowald, Amy Konary, Melissa Webster, Sanjeev Pal, Darren Bibby, Christine Dover, and Steve White.
So on to the predictions; 2010 was the year of moderate business recovery as the world moved slowly out of economic recession. The software trends we identified last year have matured, thus creating a far reaching wave of change throughout the enterprise. It also laid the foundation for a redefined software industry.
In 2011 several core trends will continue to drive change for businesses and for the software industry in general. Cloud computing, which has already been established in application markets, is gaining momentum up and down the enterprise software stack. Cloud is also a key enabler to many of the other trends. The enterprise is moving along in it’s change to a more social business, both externally with customer and partner initiatives and internally with new ways of empowering collaborative work. Social data, analyzed through new socialytic platforms is growing in it’s ability to influence executive decisions. New business models are starting to emerge that combine hyper-connectivity with cloud computing, enterprise mobility, and social software to create a people-centric / organic business network and new approaches to commerce are creating opportunities to dramatically change the customer shopping experience.
We believes that 2011 will see the expansion of business change that had already started in spite of a languishing economy, driven by the new social customer, empowered employees and a convergence of new technical capabilities. This business change cycle will challenge the enterprise but will offer many new business opportunities. The required underpinnings for these business changes will, we believe, offer technology vendors significant growth opportunities. We also believe that 2011 will be a year of M&A activity as the software industry continues to consolidate while also seeing the re-emergence of a viable IPO market. With these factors in mind we see the following key trends for 2011:
1. Social profiles become the Internet fingerprint
2. The resurgence of eCommerce, increasing importance of providing a social customer experience, proliferation of context aware mobile apps and emergence of new social tools will lead to an innovative commerce experience that is a hybrid of social, mobile, online and brick and mortar.
3. Cloud and the economic impact of new subscription models is reshaping the software channel model for vendors and their partners.
4. The enterprise gets serious about mobile applications, moving to more open and secure mobile platforms that provide multi-device management and much broader mobile apps deployment.
5. Hyper connectivity and cloud computing leads the social business to the next generation business model based on organic business networks.
6. Social collaboration and networking tools bring new life - not death - to email.
7. Socialytics moves from enterprise experiment to core business intelligence tool in support of critical executive decision making.
8. The growth of social media and meteoric expansion of content causes a data glut that can only be made relevant through people-centric curation, leading to an explosion of tools and methods to facilitate the process.
9. The AppStore software distribution model and subsequent disruption of pricing models leads to lower software costs and more transparent software pricing.
10. The changing nature of work drives new solutions for collaboration, project management, and managing a distributed and often indirect (contract) workforce (the Human Cloud).
That's our list, what do you think?
Tags: predictions, 2011, social web, web 2.0, e2.0, AppStore, collaboration, networked business, socialytics, human cloud, curation
