Social and mobile and cloud – where enterprise applications are going

There is a new world order in Silicon Valley, and by extrapolation, the world of technology.  Out are Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and in are Facebook, Zynga, Groupon. The question is: if I am in the enterprise applications space what is the next big thing after Salesforce.com ?

I see three areas of innovation:

(1) Social: with everyone jumping on the Facebook bandwagon, there will be a way to make applications more social. How is this going to happen? I don’t know but I can guess the following

– your work will include more and easier collaboration

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– traditional e-mail will disappear and be replaced by concepts such as “Like”, “Recommend” etc.

– sharing will become more common

– the boundry between employee and non-employee will disappear

(2) Mobile: this is the easy one. One will be able to do their work using just a mobile phone. So, the PC disappeared a while ago and very soon the laptop will disappear. Will it be replaced by a tablet (e.g. iPad) or a smartphone?

(3) Cloud: this is an interesting one, because I feel that we are very early in the lifycycle of cloud computing. I predict the following

– the data center as we know it will disappear

– instead you will find cloud centers!

– storage will be a hot area

– there will be a whole new category of Fedex-types of companies that “deliver anywhere” using cloud-based services

Are you ready for all this innovation? Hope you are as optimistic about these trends as I am. We will soon welcome a new class of billionaires …. you could be one of them. How exciting!

Filed under: Enterprise applications software, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Venture Capital