It is my belief that the modern enterprise has three technology challenges. Of these two are well documented and the third is yet to be acknowledged.
In 2000, Marc Benioff changed the software landscape by launching Salesforce, the father of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model. He used “no software” as his core marketing message, as he flipped revenues from license-based on-premise software to subscription-based cloud-based software. With Amazon launching Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006, the world finally realised the power of cloud computing. Challenge then become how to adopt these technologies within the slow moving enterprises, where IT Directors had a near monopoly on which software employees were allowed to use. IT Directors monopoly became threatened, when anyone was able to subscribe to software operating on SaaS model by simply charging using company credit cards, or in some cases, using employee’s own credit cards and then claiming back on expenses. Whilst this gap has been tightened recently thanks to strengthening of employee contracts on the back of ISO 27001 Information Security Management standard, those who continue to overstep the rules are not just employees but also the top management.
Source: Gartner’s Top 10 Technology Trends for 2015 (Gartner 2015)
Thanks to Apple with their iphone which revolunatise the use of software on phones and the subsequent deployment of Android by Google allowed increase use of business software via mobile phones. Whilst the screen sizes of smart phones have recently grown in size, the need to display information conscisely and in an intuitive manner using new technologies have caused significant grief to IT Managers. Where there is a problem, there will be a new wave of suppliers. And the emergence of thousands of mobile developers world over is a testament to this problem.
So today, the enterprise and even smaller businesses are trying to take advantage and to some degree control of the cloud computing opportunity whilst trying to support employees desire to work from mobile device that we carry anywhere including to our beds.
Whilst Gartner’s 2015 Technology Trends (see figure above) do not identify personalisation, we, UnifiedVU believe this is where the next challenge will arise from.
As I presented at the last EuroCloud Event in Manchester, the world as we know is getting filled up with more and more software, especially offering best of breed solutions. A good example is that in 2011, about 100 companies offered marketing software solutions. In 2012 and 2013, this number tripled to about 350 and 950 respectively. By early 2015, the number has risen to 1876 products/companies. I actually estimate the number to be much higher as the products included are mostly well-known American companies.
As the numbers continue to grow, the number of software solutions a typical employee is faced with every day increases. At the same time, some products are used for short-term without giving due attention to how the data will be managed when the product is no longer used. These issues cause immense difficulties to companies, and likely to become a headache for many IT Managers.
As employees consume more and more solutions with no extra time in their hands (the world still has 24 hours in the day and this is unlikely to change), the employee productivity drops. We believe a solutions such as UnifiedVU Employee Productivity Platform, could remedy by unifying all your software into one consistent design view.
Source: Technology Adoption Cycle (Gartner 2015)
Unfortunately Gartner is yet to recognise the problem or the solution. In their own classifications, we would fall into “emerging” category.