Top 10 Enterprise Products and Trends of 2011
It was a year of consolidation for the enterprise. A year where maturing technologies trumped startups. The year that social networking began to creep into just about every nook and cranny of corporate applications, even something banal like email that you wouldn't have expected these to change with the times. It was a year where tablets once again took the limelight, and not just for personal reasons or for use only in extreme vertical markets.
It was a year where APIs ruled, and vendors with solid interfaces and programming tools leapt ahead of the competition. It was a year where online video became more than just a way to pass the time watching skateboarding pets and foolish pranks. Let's look at our top ten products, services and trends for the enterprise.
1. Oracle buying almost everyone
It certainly seemed like they were. Not a quarter went by where Oracle didn't make some major merger. Perhaps the Sun acquisition was big in terms of sheer size and sex appeal. But in 2011, Oracle bought several key players in middleware and storage, firming up their positions for the Web-connected enterprise. This included Pillar
Data, a storage networking vendor; Endeca, an analysis tool provider; Fatwire, a large-scale content management system supplier;
RightNow Technologies, the leading vendor in customer
service portals, and Ksplice, a company that sells a
zero downtime update technology for Linux. And these were just the major
deals over the past year. Clearly, they are building an empire over in Redwood
Shores.
2. The iPad is the new executive dashboard
The second version of Apple's iPad came out this year, along with a much-need v5 of iOS. That seemed to open the floodgates and suddenly, they were in every executive's hands. The major remote-control apps from Citrix, LogMeIn and VNC got updates, and more enterprise software tools such as CRM and BI and ERP got their own iPad-friendly front end apps. Earlier in the year in our article here, we discuss whether the iPad is friend or foe of the enterprise, but by now it is clear that the iPad is here to stay and could be the tablet of choice for busy execs who don't need to do a lot of typing (or who don't need Flash-based Web pages either). And
in our story last month, even coders can leverage the iPad
too. Now if only Apple could actually understand that iOS
needs a really solid protocol stack to talk to lots of non-iThings.
3.Yammer becomes the go-to corporate microblogging platform
We gave Yammer props as one of our best of 2010 companies, and they continued to excel this year. Yammer has been around several years, and has gotten some stiff competition in the microblogging/corporate social networking space. But this was the year that they deepened their ecosystem, as we wrote about earlier. They have had some big wins with large customers, such
as the Australian branch of Deloitte.
4. Better tools to handle business video streams
5. Socialization of email listservs
Just about every class of enterprise software has become more socialized, incorporating social media and social networking components into its feature set. We just focus on one here to show you how far the plain and unassuming email listserver has come in the past year. Lyris and Constant Contact both added major socialization features. Even LinkedIn has become more social too.
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It was a year of consolidation for the enterprise. A year where maturing technologies trumped startups. The year that social networking began to creep into just about every nook and cranny of corporate applications, even something banal like email that you wouldn't have expected these to change with the times. It was a year where tablets once again took the limelight, and not just for personal reasons or for use only in extreme vertical markets. \n\nIt was a year where APIs ruled, and vendors with solid interfaces and programming tools leapt ahead of the competition. It was a year where online video became more than just a way to pass the time watching skateboarding pets and foolish pranks. Let's look at our top ten products, services and trends for the enterprise. \n
