ReadWriteEnterprise

As IT becomes more consumerized and cloud computing becomes more of a reality, the app itself is becoming almost irrelevant across enterprises. As the desktop PC model has morphed into the network, and as the network has become just another extension of the Internet, it is all about the API, the ways that apps talk to each other that has made them front and center to today's corporate computing infrastructures.

Platform-as-a-service is one of the toughest types of cloud offerings to understand, but provides some of the most promise - especially for startups. We've looked at the confusion and the promise before. But what about the enterprise? We looked at the Forrester Wave on PaaS recently, and it had more of an enterprise focus. But it also highlighted that the market is still young.

And what about private clouds? We looked at one option for building private a PaaS, Apprenda, recently. Microsoft Azure and Vmware Cloud Foundry will provide similar options. It's a new but growing area.

Do you think PaaS, public or private, has a role to play in the future of the enterprise?

Jive and Salesforce.com have been seen as competitors since at least the announcement of Chatter, which brought Salesforce.com into the enterprise 2.0 market. Jive has also started to encroach on Salesforce.com territory by announcing its Jive Apps Market, a competitor to the Salesforce.com AppExchange and Force.com platform.

But now, Appirio is making the two vendors' services work in harmony.

Asana is a company created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Googler Justin Rosenstein. Its aim is nothing short of reinventing how we collaborate. It's a lofty goal, especially with so many Enterprise 2.0 tools aiming to do just that. But it has deep pockets, high profile advisers, a strong vision and lots of buzz.

The team has been toiling on the project in secret for two years, but have finally started talking about it over the past few months. In February, the company held an open house where Rosenstein demoed and explained the product. It's currently in private beta, but don't hold your breath waiting for an invite.

Here's what you should know about the company and its product.

We've recently watched as companies like Jive and Salesforce.com have shifted focus to become platform-centric companies. Social software, CRM and other products are becoming less important than platform-as-service and enterprise app stores for many companies. But what's going to run on these platforms?

"We don't want to be the Facebook of the enterprise, we want to be the Zynga," says co-CEO of Rypple Daniel Debow. Considering the role gamification is playing in Rypple's development, he may mean that in more way than one. Rypple is a software-as-a-service for employee feedback. Staff can give each other feedback and managers can coach their employees and manage goals.

Last night, Jive Software released its Jive Apps SDK to developers. For Jive, this isn't just an SDK release: it's the beginning of a new direction. Jive assigned twice as many developers to building its application platform and Jive Apps Market as it did to developing the previous release of Jive. And that's an indication not just of where Jive is going as a company, but where the enterprise software market seems to be headed. Salesforce.com made it clear last week that it is now a platform company vendor first and a SaaS company second. Companies such as Jive, Salesforce.com and Google are not just trying to copy the success of app stores in the consumer market, but create a whole new paradigm for enterprise software.

The family is talking about turkey again. That must mean it's time for reflection and to look ahead to the next 12 to 18 months.

In that spirit, here is part one of a two part series on trends in the enterprise. What's evident in all of these trends is the role data is playing in how technologies are evolving. Is it the megatrend of the next decade?

In all of this, we think about the way people work these days. We have multiple mobile phones. We work in offices and homes. For many people, working is anywhere they can find a flat surface for their laptops or for that matter just finding a signal for their smartphone.