Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

The Year of the Compliance – I can’t afford not to be compliant but how can I afford to be compliant

With every new year comes a look back at last year. The current monetary crisis will reignite regulation, governance and compliance concerns. What this crisis has taught us is that markets are global and local regulations cannot protect global markets. New global regulations will come into place and need to be enforced globally. From a content management perspective this means:

• Audit everything and everybody in everything they do in every region
• Audit not just documents but also email, instant messages and also social networking when it relates to business
• Audit not just additions or changes but also access
• Enable rapid searching and eDiscovery across not one but all repositories of all types that a person may have accessed
• Make it simple to show the process and rules you have been using and the change control in your systems including your websites

This will require open standards and architectures to support these new requirements and avoid costly highly damaging eDiscovery requests. This “mass” compliance will require systems that are:

• Low cost
• Simple for all users to use
• Simple to rollout on a large scale
• Based on open standards for integration

Then you can address the question in a rational way:

“Can I afford not to be compliant and also how can I afford to be compliant

Prediction for 2009: 2009 will see a resurgence of compliance and an audit everything approach from a content management perspective. This will further drive open standards adoption to enable cross repository access and analysis offering commoditization driving down the cost of content compliance.

The Year of the Consumerization of Buying Enterprise Software – Discover, Try, Buy - with the Wisdom of Crowds

In the 1990’s there was a lack of freely available product information and the only way to access and try an enterprise product was through the sales division of that company. The world has changed and the internet has made:

• Information on a product freely available
• A product download freely available
• Advice on that product freely available
• The opinions of masses of users freely available

The credit crunch is forcing companies to look for value – not just in the cost of software but in the way they evaluate software. Today, to discover a product you go to Google. To get opinion and information you rely on the wisdom of crowds. People are turning away from “the complexity machine” and rewarding simplicity, value and transparency. Tools such as Google trends show in real-time market trends. Masses of blogs offer up-to-date information. Ranking and access allows good information to rise to the top. This is what has driven the success of Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica.

Prediction for 2009: Enterprise software acquisition will be consumerized. Companies will “Search” the web, trusted blogs and forums, “Try” the software via download or in the cloud, and ‘Buy” if they like it, typically through a subscription model.

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7. The Year of Consumerization of Enterprise Software

Enterprise software has often been very successful “shelf-ware”, being expensive, difficult to rollout, expensive to scale and difficult for users to learn and want to use. The consumer market and Web 2.0 has shown the way in a number of areas including:

• Simple and intuitive to learn with no training course
• A system that users want to use as opposed to being forced to use
• Low-cost, massive scalability

A study for CIO magazine entitled “Nine out of 10 users said they could work better if they could bring their home computer into work,” points to users finding the web and web 2.0 applications easier to use and more productive than legacy enterprise applications. The iPhone, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter, Google, WordPress, delicious, Slideshare and Friendfeed will influence enterprise software and expectations as much as they have the internet. Enterprise software will become consumerized, changing the trend of enterprise software funding the consumer market irreversibly. In the 1980s and 1990s enterprises and the military set the pace for technology innovation. Consumer technologies are now increasingly driving technology innovation and IT adoption.

The Consumerization of Enterprise Software

Prediction for 2009: ECM software will become consumerized and as much at home in the home office as the head office. Just like you don’t say software is object-oriented you won’t say software is Web 2.0. It will just be there, inside and outside the enterprise. Interfaces will move to Rich Internet Interfaces such as AJAX, Flex and standards such as RSS, REST, RSS, ATOM, JSON, OpenSearch will become as taken for granted as http and HTML.

8. The Year of the Lean Software – The Development Diet

Every new year has “New Year’s Resolutions” and a diet is often on the list. This year the diet will be in software development. The 1990’s was to software, what junk food is to a weight-loss plan. Bloatware and obesity went hand-in-hand. This century has seen core technology such as Java remain at the server level but lightweight scripting and rapid development become the norm for application development and the antidote to bloated vendors, products and applications. Lightweight development focuses on:

• Simplicity and rapid development
• Lightweight scripting using such as PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl and Python vs. J2EE and .NET
• REST vs. SOAP
• Web scalable vs. Enterprise scalable
• Mashing up internal and external content vs. content from one system

Prediction for 2009: Loosely-coupled scale-out, REST architectures will form the foundation of new systems with web applications developed in lightweight scripting languages delivering mashed-up content into a RIA will be the way forwards in 2009.

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