It's Good To Be King

I love predictions. One part hype, one part guesswork. And they happen on a regular basis, so you can always count on having something to noodle, to agree with, to scoff at (or all of the above) at least once a year.

While I am not good at predictions myself, I appreciate those types of folks who have the confidence to anoint themselves ‘King of the Future’ and pour through the murk of their crystal ball to scry the secrets the rest of us are too thick to see.

Here at JackBe we’re blessed with not 1, not 2, but 3 very good prognosticators. By now I am sure you’ve seen the 2011 predictions from our CTO, John Crupi. Interestingly, John’s predictions raised the hackles of Dan Malks and Deepak Alur, our other great future-seers, because they weren’t terribly ‘serious’. Dan and Deepak quickly offered their own deep and serious thoughts on 2011.

But we all know there can be only one King. And so I thought I’d sponsor something of the ‘future competition’. I’m publishing Deepak and Dan’s 2011 thoughts here and we’ll check back periodically and see which King continues to reign.

Without further ado, here’s what’s in store in 2011 according to King Dan:

The Cloud, part 1: Cloud marketing continues to rage and we get more feature parity across environments. Amazon recently scored a victory when it lured Microsoft’s Federal Division leader to lead its cloud efforts, but Microsoft’s Azure cloud will continue to close the gap from a technology and infrastructure perspective in 2011, creating a real choice for organizations and developers who want to build cloud-based solutions.

The Cloud, part 2: The Microsoft Azure Marketplace will bring commercial credibility to its nascent cloud offering, but many organizations will demand higher level features, including simpler access to APIs, ability to combine and aggregate multiple services, and combine information from the Azure Marketplace with other high value Enterprise information sources, such as CRM, ERP, and SharePoint.

Business Intelligence: There’s too much BS in BI! Customers will continue to demand more dynamic approaches to BI. Lighter weight BI approaches won’t entirely eat heavy-weight BI’s lunch, but will continue to nibble away as customers insist on access to more up to the minute, dynamic information to support more timely strategic decision making.

Portals/ECM, part 1: SharePoint 2010 adoption will continue to outpace expectations. Enterprises are typically slow to adopt new infrastructure, but SharePoint 2010 will be an exception and will be adopted more widely than expected.

Portals/ECM, part 2: And because of #1 above…SharePoint ‘Sprawl’ will be a top 10 issue for organizations who rely heavily on SharePoint. With its ubiquitous adoption and “swiss army knife”-like promise, SharePoint’s blessing can also become its curse, if not strongly governed. Unifying information across your SharePoint environment and sharing information from SharePoint with other aspects of your Enterprise, including CRM, ERP, Java Portals, etc is a growing challenge that is gaining visibility, due to its growing bottom line impact.

Not to be outdone, King Deepak sees some similar trends and some new ones for 2011:

Enterprise Tablets: The iPad is going to be very prominent in the enterprise. See what Citrix is doing at http://www.ipadsatwork.com; JP Morgan already announced their iPad plans. Other tablets might follow soon, but for next year iPad will be king.

Enterprise Mobile: HTML5 will start making more inroads as the preferred technology for mobile apps. It will move native platforms into a niche (for gaming and some other applications).

Enterprise App Stores: Enterprises realize they want/need a one-stop shop App Store to manage all their apps (web apps, mobile apps, tablet apps, ...) instead of App Store per device/technology. However, adoption of Enterprise App Store will be slow.

Business Intelligence: BI will not be able to do "Real-Time" despite their marketing it as such. Many small/niche BI vendors will disappear this year.

Cloud: Enterprises finally start getting cozier with the idea of putting their data on the cloud, but will need security and governance.

Other Stuff: CoD White Ops will take over the video game world.

This is good stuff! And I see a common thread to most of these: dynamic, on-demand information. We're an information hungry society and these are the kinds of trends that can help fulfill that demand.

But there can be only one king. I can’t wait to see who wears the Future King crown at the end of the year.