predictions

It would not be a proper New Years celebration without predictions for the upcoming year, so here's mine:

- look forward to good economic news in '04, job growth will be modest as companies expand cautiously and strive to maintain record high productivity statistics.

- offshoring continues on a project driven basis, with some tech specialties moving faster than others. For example, quality control and documentation are no-brainers for offshore moves. Offshoring from India to China accelerates, causing tension between those countries and something for Americans to find irony in.

- consumer electronices become modularized and mainstream, such as portable media players (MP3 players for us old guys) docking in cars and at home.

- wireless connectivity for home appliances finally takes off.

- VoIP gets big, scaring the crap out of the RBOC's because it obliterates their entire pricing model. Calls for regulation persist, but as long as Chairman Powell is driving we won't see it. VoIP in business goes mainstream as increasing numbers of medium and large business realize they don't need the phone company for their phone calls.

- Linux... what can you say, it's on a tear in the data center. The SCO v. IBM lawsuit continues to be interesting only because of the childish behavior that SCO executives exhibit.

- Spam continues, frustrating legislators who believe they can actually control it, and companies because it costs them a bundle. Good spam filtering technologies develop that go beyond what current stuff does, spammers continue to outwit it.

- social networking companies will figure out that hype isn't a business model, and most people derive no benefit from their offerings. The more progressive social networking gigs will continue their moves to morph into knowledge management software that works.

- Google goes public, it's huge. Salesforce.com goes public, not so huge.

- services-oriented architectures built on Web services enables a new class of enterprise software that delivers composited applications to customers more-or-less on an on-demand basis. This more than anything else in the last couple of years finally makes possible a new delivery and pricing model for enterprise software.

- and finally, SAP continues to take market share away from our competitors... but I'm biased.

Happy New Year from SAP Ventures,
Lisa, Jeff, Martina, Jen, Paul, Kathy, and Tanja.

Comments

[Marc g]

Good predictions. I disagree that documention should be offshored (even though I know it will be). It should be done as part of the development project by the developers. Of course if they have already been offshored...

Hopefully social software can find new roots this year to actually make a difference in the world. I think there is a lot of potential for some of tools in that space to emerge as open source projects to help in citizen oversight of government activities like the MIT Open Government Awareness project (http://opengov.media.mit.edu/).

I share your belief that SAP will continue to take away market share from their competitors. Of course I have the same bias issue there.

[jn]

Marc,
on the offshore topic, I think where we will end up is select services in the development process being sent overseas, as opposed to wholesale movement of the entire dev process.

I should add one more prediction, closely related to the above topic. The software development industry is embracing global work processes, that is obvious, but I think the point is lost in this debate that because of this trend we have an opportunity to grow the industry by an order of magnitude. This would be an example of demand being created by bandwidth, with the increase in bandwidth coming largely from the offshore side of things.

happy new year

[Marc g]

Global work processes, that sounds familiar. We certainly have that at SAP. I like the idea of these processes growing the overall market. For the software industry I can believe that can happen without decimating the rank and file worker in the home country of software companies. I do fear for the rank and file in the back office IT staff. I will always question wether moving local IT staff overseas is a good idea. I sincerly doubt that such move benefits the company that does it. Sure in the short run it frees up cash for CxO pay...