2008 (well at least 364 days of it) Predictions

I decided to gain a slight statistical advantage over my other Enterprise Irregular bloggers by hedging a few days into the New Year to publish my 2008 predictions. Fortunately (and to many chagrins, I am sure), waiting a mere two days has revalidated the premise of one of my predictions: 100 dollars a barrel anyone? Its gonna be a year to remember.

As a side note, and somewhat true to form, I have a number of posts related to these topics in the workshop, sitting on the easel, one coat of paint away from publishing. I would promise to try and get some regular pace to this mess in 2008 but why make a resolution you’re bound to break (I have not gone to gym yet either folks).

Lastly – I apologize that so many of these things are interconnected – I can’t help it as we’re in a major phase shift right now – a sort of tech will follow the dollars will follow the tech kind of Mobius strip.

1) Downloadable corporate software (e.g. JBoss, MySQL, IIS) will start to be delivered as a VM (Virtual Machine) image as well as an exe with an embedded installer. Why the heck would anyone want to go through the hell of installing Oracle 10g on your own machine when you can just download a 20gig VM image in one of 1000 configurations of your choice all prebuilt and installed into the VM by the smart, capable and credible engineers at Oracle corporation. As a side note, this might be a fantastic way for Oracle to push their new VM platform. If I had to download and install a ton of Oracle software I’d surely install their VM platform first if they promised me everything else came as an OVM image from them.

2) Someone will set up a VMWare version of NetFlix (this is one that I have a post coming on). QA labs, developers, help desks, etc.. will be able to just download and rent any of 1000 installations or configurations of software that they need to test against for a short period of time. Need Windows XP SP 2 Build 2082 to hunt down a weird registry issue – no problem – just add it to your queue! This will drastically reduce the cost of traditional software QA departments (see the connection to some other predictions below). As a side benefit, rPath will finally get some recognition for being years ahead of the curve here (applies to #1 as well as I predict rPath emerges as the next InstallShield). Note they already do this for Amazon’s EC2 initiative with prebuilt Amazon Machine Images.

3) (Tied to #2) - Venture Capitalists will realize that the capital investment required to make a SaaS company profitable (25-40M) is equal to or maybe even more than the capital investment required in traditional enterprise software (e.g.Newmerix). The gains of time to market, lower cost development, a annuity revenue will be offset by the operations costs, cost of sales, and the decreasing advantage of the SaaS model from a development perspective due to #2.

4) Virtualization and cloud computing will blur the lines between what is SaaS and what is classic enterprise software as buyers will be able to buy a pre-installed copy of classic enterprise software on a VM that they (or the ISV themselves) can run in the cloud.  In the end, the debate between SaaS and Enterprise Software might simply be where the layer of virtualization is (at the hardware, OS, database, application, or policy level). This last thought is attributable to the Vishal Sikka. This will also drive Venture Capitalist back to classic enterprise software investments (see #3) as in the end its all really just picking the best people to put a bunch of 1s and 0s in the right order.

5) Oracle will finally buy BEA (duh!).

6) Serena will buy Borland when they realize that their new Enterprise 2.0 strategy is taking too long to reach critical mass and produce real dollars and that they can leverage their massive existing customer base into the true "independent" player in the ALM space (MERQ/HP and IBM/Rational being the two fully integrated players). BMC and CA will continue to do little else in 2008 than tout their CMDBs as the solution to addressing the massive change in IT management towards the change-centric model. Compuware, a company with huge potential to disrupt the software industry will continue to be driven by its DNA as a professional services company and will still lead with people, follow with product.

7) Salesforce.com, having trained Wall Street to value them on raw account number growth, will starts to see the inevitable slow down in this number and declare they are entering a new market (financials or HR) as part of their core business. I predicted this for 2007 but i'm gonna roll it over to 2008 – this is my mulligan.

8) The cost of power in data centers will be such a disruptor that virtualization will start to revolutionize how applications are designed and built. Virtualization not only provides the ability to maximize power usage for a piece of hardware (most servers run at about 60% of their power usage at idle) but also provides application mobility so the right applications can be paired with the right hardware across a companies varied data center assets. Increased mobility of applications will drive renewed expansion into outsourced data center providers for those that can provide the right latency/security/redundancy/cost equation.

9) Someone who is publicly anti-war will end up writing a blog post called "How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the Republicans and Love the War " because they will realize that the very companies who supported gaining control over natural resources bungled it so badly that it drove billions into investment in alternate energy, cars, virtualization, and data center alternatives that compete with their core business directly or indirectly (data centers consume 1.5% of all power in the United States).

10) VMs will start to be adopted (slowly) on the consumer desktop when they realize they can install as much software as they want in different VMs without having their laptop slow to a snails pace the more they use it. Dealing with the small price to pay that some application must sit on the same OS (e.g. Acrobat needs to be on a VM with IE), the added benefit of uncluttered OSes will only be the cake to the icing that the user can do a rollback when there is a security breach. A company will emerge to help manage this new version of the virtual desktop with a primary feature showing the "installation timeline" of your machine and letting you rollback to various points in that timeline in case something goes wrong.

11) Oracle will continue to promote a multi-product strategy to get customers to start using Fusion which will require those customers to figure out how to manage multiple packaged applications at once. Newmerix will be the company to help them do this because Oracle’s tools are application specific and Oracle Enterprise Manager has no cross application capability or real features to manage the complete application change lifecycle.

Comments

[Niel Robertson]

I have been doing tons of work in the VM space recently and have a series of posts coming about the VM revolutions no one is talking about/thinking about yet. It will disrupt EVERYTHING.

[James Governor]

very nice

on virtual appliances++

I had *no clue* you tracked shit like Serena. they are a v interesting case study right now