Just read a report from IDC about the top IT trends they expect to see in 2008. (Click here to see a press release that outlines the key points.)
Essentially, the report notes that things like social networking, mobile platforms, online delivery methods, “web gadgets,” and appliances will be finally taken up en masse by larger IT providers.
Sugar has always been on top of all of these since inception. But as usual, smaller companies tend to be a bit more ahead of the curve. But what I think might be the most interesting is the appliance side of things. Sugar’s appliance offering, Sugar Cube, is popular in certain segments but not as big a part of our business as On-Demand and On-Site deployment options. I wonder if that will change as the term picks up steam in the press and becomes more buzzworthy as more enterprises embrace the concept.
The second interesting area is noted in the release:
The sudden expansion of social networking will lead to a tsunami of unstructured data. This will lead to the emergence of “Eureka 2.0″ software that combines text analytics, sentiment extraction, and related technologies to distill the “wisdom of crowds.”
Sugar has been developing more and more web 2.0 and unstructured data capabilities for some time. (Perhaps they read the report I co-authored on the topic in 2005.) Text analytics is nothing new, but no one has really hit a home run with managing all the unstructured data in the enterprise. I’m not saying we have the answer, but hopefully IDC is right in predicting that some progress may finally be made this coming year.
