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.
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Posted by: bob kesto | January 24, 2011 at 11:32 PM
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.
Posted by: Niel Robertson | January 18, 2008 at 05:35 AM
very nice
on virtual appliances++
I had *no clue* you tracked shit like Serena. they are a v interesting case study right now
Posted by: James Governor | January 18, 2008 at 05:01 AM