When Scott Kirsner, the Boston Globe Tech Columnist and New England’s Champion of Startups and Entrepreneurs sent me an email sharing details on his upcoming event, What’s Next in Tech, I started wondering what that would be. I came up with few predictions and asked some of the people I respect to validate my predictions. So here are my predictions for what we can expect in the coming years:
Mainstreaming of On-demand Small Business Services
Since late 1990s, large companies have benefited immensely with the SaaS-ification of services. Salesforce.com, NetSuite and many others have built large businesses providing enterprise business services over the web. Enterprises loved them as they did not have to make upfront capital investments and benefited from all the free upgrades, maintenance and more. These services are exhaustive in their capabilities and therefore complex to use requiring a lot of training.
Since 2004, and the launch of BaseCamp by 37Signals.com, small businesses started to get a taste for on-demand services. The success of 37signals.com and FreshBooks.com has shown that small businesses are looking for simple to use business applications that help them become productive, efficient and mobile.
I predict that more and more small business related services will migrate online and will be offered as an on-demand service. Some of the applications you will see include expense management, document management, bookkeeping, tax preparation, and virtual assistant services. Moreover, these services along with those already in the market will move beyond early adopter phase and become mainstream.
Everyware computing
With the advent of the iPhone, EveryWare or Ubiquitous computing is becoming a reality. For everything you would like to do on the road and anytime, you have “An App for that”. More and more applications are hosting their data online making it easy to access your data from any device - smart phone, laptop, netbook, television, car, and plance whether yours or somebody elses. I predict that more and more applications will become ubiquitous and accessible from everyware.
Enterprise Cloud computing
We all know how startups including Pixily and many small firms have become early adopters of cloud computing. Enterprise companies have been holding out for good reasons. They have more stringent security standards, they need to have complete control and more importantly they do not want to be tied to a single cloud. With startups such as CloudSwitch addressing these issues, you will start to see Enterprises adopting the cloud. My last prediction is that enterprises will adopt the cloud in a big way in the next 2-5 years.
I would like to hear your thoughts on these predictions and please do share your own predictions. I hope to see you at the What’s next in Tech event on June 25th. Since this is put together by a stellar group of entprepreneurs and VCs, this event is bound to be a huge success.
