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Paul Saunders, 8th April 2010

The Most Important of the Next Wave of Technologies

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I have been following a Blog by author Phil Simon who writes about subjects that we at Conduce Consulting are passionate about: specifically Successful IT Projects and Emerging Technologies in Enterprise IT. I left a comment on one of his blog posts which triggered a bit of dialogue between us and resulted in an invitation to enter a competition he was running to win a signed copy of his book here:

http://www.philsimonsystems.com/blog/announcements/contest/

The rules were to submit 200 to 1000 words describing which of the “Next Waves of Technologies” was the most important and why. I chose Open Source & API as I believe this trend rather than a technology is going to have the greatest impact on Enterprise IT over the next couple of years.

I have copy and pasted my entry here which has been shortlisted as a finalist which you can vote on to win the prize. All votes are appreciated.

In my opinion Open Source and Developer Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are the most significant and therefore the most important emerging technologies within the field of Enterprise IT.
Power is continuing to shift away from the traditional big players in the field of Business Computing and is becoming more and more democratised. Open Source leads the way in this regard. Who would have thought 10 years ago when Microsoft was ploughing investment into its professionally written Encarta Encyclopaedia product that it would be rendered redundant by a free open-editable alternative written by anonymous internet users who write without pay? The same goes for internet browsers. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still being pushed the hardest by Mozilla’s Open Source FireFox. OpenOffice.Org is making real inroads to the Office Desktop Application market with governmental and educational bodies around the world leading the way to a free suite of applications. And with no revenue to speak of you can hardly describe it as a “market share”.

Software developers and web investors have cottoned on to the fact that in order to promote adoption of their product and add value they need to open up the guts of their application to third party developers, users, partners and the general public to create innovative additional features and add-ons. This doesn’t always need to be via true open source: APIs and SDKs allow a controlled means to allow anyone to expand the bounds of an application into new territories and complimentary products that the original developer never would have dreamed of being able to achieve.

For end users and for Enterprise in general this amounts to getting far more for less. For practically every Enterprise oriented software product there is now an Open Source or free alternative. For every new web application coming to market there are a set of tools available to allow you to develop complementary products. You no longer have to rely on the vendor to charge you through the nose and wait 18 months for a new feature to be introduced – you can do it yourself or outsource it to someone else.

37Signals and FogCreek are great examples of enterprise software developers who positively promote the wealth of external applications and add-ons as a positive feature of their products. The iPhone App store has created a market for the backroom programmer to market their products on a global scale and this trend is spreading with Android, Windows Mobile, Google and others releasing their own equivalents. Market forces will eventually force everyone to jump on the bandwagon and open up their code to whoever wants access to it. This shift towards open sourcing will be self perpetuating: Tools will become more and more accessible causing development to be partially deskilled therefore allowing practically anyone to develop their own add-ons. From a user perspective the bounds of where one application ends and another one begins will be blurred and computing will be well and truly democratized.

If you want to find out more about how Open Source and software APIs can help your organisation achieve a better return on your technology investment contact Conduce Consulting

Paul Saunders, 8th April 2010 at 9:53pm

UPDATE I just found out via Twitter that I won. Thanks to Phil Simon for a fun contest and to everyone who voted for me!! I promise to review the book here once I receive and read it. Paul

Phil Simon, 9th April 2010 at 2:06pm

Congrats on winning, Paul! Enjoy the book. It went out yesterday.

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