Forrester Chief on Emerging Trends

George Colony, the founder & Chief executive of Forrester Research, on future trends:

• SAP has a 10% advantage over Oracle, as it is not preoccupied with integrating PeopleSoft & Siebel


• Companies offering software and services focused on technology that has not yet been developed for the commercial market (yet) will ride the next wave


• The big players in the new wave will be the likes of Google, Salesforce.com and a number of other small start-ups, by way of leveraging the “executable internet”, which refers to a new level of interactivity online involving websites that function more like software and less like pages to read.


• In the future, much business software will be free and funded by advertising; Google will be leading the revolution


• The "extended internet" will supplant today's internet experience, with 14 billion devices connected to the internet by 2012


• Between 1996 and 2006 every company connected to the internet, but from 2006 to 2016 every company will be connected to every product; for example, he says, in the future a company like Coca-Cola will know where every can of Coke is in the world.

Well, Mr. Colony is certainly bold and good with jargon like “extended internet” and "executable internet”. Whether these prophecies come to life is yet to be seen, and all of us know that research firms miss the point oftener than not. There are quite a few challenges for the likes of Google, before they can achieve a significant presence in the enterprise. While Microsoft should certainly be alarmed by Google’s progress, I don’t think SAP & Oracle have anything to worry about—yet. SalesForce, and its brethren in SaaS have a long way to go before they can take on the mega vendors. As I have written before, here, we might end up with a hybrid of the pure SaaS and pure packaged application models in the medium term. As far as tracking each coke can is concerned……

Category:Analysis, MyView