Category Archives: Cloud Computing

The App Economy – How should we view app monetization?

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The blogosphere is all about apps and how different ecosystems compete for the eyeballs of these and the money of course. You might still remember the the news when a far app pulled as much as $10,000/day in revenue but since then there is tens of similar applications on the marketplace. This started a trend where people left their well-paid jobs to chase their dream of creating apps and living a life without pressures. The growth of app economy is one of the most promising trends, but people/organizations that want to make real money of it, need to include some risk management into it as well. The app industry has become similar to film industry where relatively few people make money and the ones that make, are hugely successful like Angry Birds phenomenon from Finland.

One might of course ask oneself is whether this is a shift in our society and how work is performed. according to Erik Brynjolfsson (director of the M.I.T. Center of digital business), “technology is always destroying jobs and always creating jobs, but in recent years the destruction has been happening faster than the creation”. There is no question that technology is creating new jobs and apps can be part of this opportunity as can be seen in many of the reports that have studied this trend towards “app economy”.

What I have not seen many discussions around is how the app economy is linked with the enterprise software business. I have researched around this and identified the “dimensions” that are typically linked to the app business, but not that much is said how established software vendors should view this space and how these vendors can make a entry to the app space in a way that makes sense and where there is also a sustainable economical model.

So, the question that we should ask ourselves is how much of the app business is truly geared towards the consumer business and how much of this will gradually move into enterprise business? Should software vendors keep the app business in their plans when building enterprise solutions specifically using the cloud? If they should keep this in mind, what kind of pricing should the ISV use? Maybe free as the real money comes from the enterprise solution and not the app that accesses it? As you can see, it is not that clear and my own experience when working with both small and large enterprises, the app business hardly ever comes up in discussions. I am convinced that this will change and it will change very quickly. One of the drivers will be Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 developers that will create solutions that will be based on app technology and not on traditional desktop app architectural model even if these will be able to run in Windows 8 Pro environment.

Another valid question that we need to ask ourselves is whether app economy should be see purely from mobile app development perspective or should we view it from a perspective where the device is just the means to get to what you want and the backend (typically the cloud) is the one that provides the services and brokers the interaction between different services. Shouldn’t we in fact be talking about services economy instead where organizations build apps to consume and combine information from different sources using different SOA interfaces that organizations/developers have exposed to the world. Isn’t this what we have always dreamt about?

NokiaExpressI downloaded today a Windows Phone 8 app (Nokia Xpress) to my shiny Nokia Lumia 920 and this app really demonstrates where things are going. After having installed the app, it asked me whether it can use location information (which most apps want to use), but what really made me to think about the future of apps is that developers really have to think “outside the box” on when developing apps. The thing with this Nokia Xpress app is that it enables users to store and read articles on your phone (locally) so when you travel, you do not have to use expensive data roaming. I know.. there are many of these apps from before, but what this app has specifically thought of is to really monitory and minimize data usage and provide a combination of technology such as Microsoft SkyDrive technology to store videos and images without having to use the data plan. Why is this relevant to me? Just this week, my son’s data plan was going over the limit and I found out that it was all about video streaming and 2 gig data plan does not cope well with this.

The topic of “app economy” is very interesting to me as researcher, but also as practitioner. A recent paper written by Dr. Michael Mandel and Judith Scherer (commission by CTIA (The Wireless Association) and Application Developers Alliance provides an interesting view on the app economy. According to Mandel, the entire “App Economy” was coming to use in early 2009 and was popularized by a cover story run by BusinessWeek in November 2009.

The way that Dr. Michael Mandel describes App Economy in his February 2012 report resonates well with what I have educated my customers in respect to ecosystems:

“ App Economy is a collection of interlocking innovative ecosystems”. Each ecosystem consists of a core company, which creates and maintains a platform and an app marketplace, plus a small and large companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices  for that platform. Businesses can belong to multiple ecosystems and usually do”.

There is no question in my mind that this topic is relevant to anybody that works in the software industry and it is fascinating to see how this evolves with time and what kind of new companies will rise to take advantage of this.

If you work in the Microsoft ecosystem, I highly encourage you to read the article “Microsoft’s cloud vision: Why Azure is the linchpin of the firm’s new devices and services strategy”. Another great article from Information-Management.com that predicts Enterprise Apps to go mobile big time and that money apps will move to the cloud. The article lists quite a few things that are very interesting and I encourage you to read that article as well.

Stay tuned for more, there will be more to come on my research on different topics and this app economy being one of them!

Is Big Data going to replace Enterprise Data Warehousing?

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In my blog entry yesterday I concluded that Big Data as an acronym is on the rise and ISVs need to pay attention to this. The next question that one needs to pose is how is Big Data different from the traditional enterprise data warehousing? I still remember vividly the arguments 15 years ago whether Bill Inmon (considered the father of data warehousing) Top Down approach should be replaced by Ralph Kimball’s approach (Bottom Up) where the Enterprise Data Warehouse is built as collection of data marts that then together conform the enterprise data warehouse. There are also concepts such as operational data store, master data etc. Following link shows a couple of pictures that explains the difference in these approaches and a blog entry that explains pretty well the differences in these two approaches.

During my career, I have personally been involved with all and above and the latest implementation was based on SQL Server 2008 R2 with not only ETL logic to the ERP applications, but also a staging area, relational data warehouse and then the multi-dimensional OLAP cubes with SharePoint 2010. Needless to say, you need to have an understanding of multi-layer architecture and how all of this work together.

The question is how Big Data relates to all of this? One view of this is that different market segments sees it in a different way. Start-ups will see this more of a web-based approach with cloud solutions supporting Big Data. The SMB market has invested in Business Intelligence solutions and to get scale, they are going to look at cloud solutions that can take their analytics to the next stage. An then the larger enterprises that have invested huge amounts in enterprise data warehousing, data marts, ETL processes etc. will probably keep these solutions but might amend to cloud-based solutions when it is appropriate.

The competition in the Big Data space will increase during 2013 and we have already seen this by new solutions being introduced to the market like Amazon Redshift and Windows Azure Big Data. The distinction in the Big Data solutions is that many of them are typically based on NoSQL technology and data is dumped into computer memory (In-memory) and these solutions are specifically good for non-structured data. It is important to understand that there isn’t one “turn-key” solution as these types of Big Data implementations are both complex and require very distinctive skills to maneuver like “programming, statistics and how to visualize and communicate data”.

What we also need to remember is that the need to integrate data from different sources still exist, the data will be typically very different to what we are used to (like digital sensor and cameras) and when you add social media to all of this, you will have a mixture of data that never existed.

And finally, if you have been involved in Business Intelligence or Data Warehousing projects, the data/information still has to be presented in a format that makes sense for your audience, whether it be your management or other information junkies. What I do know is that analyzing the data won’t be easier than before given the fact that there is so much statistical swing into it, but the results of that data could take you and your company to the next level if information is used in proper manner.

To answer to the question I posed in my heading. No, I do not think one thing replaces another, but I would say is that you can expect to see multiple different variations on implementations and you can call them what you like and cloud will definitely be part of that implementation.

Business Analytics Gurus that you might want to follow on Twitter

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If you want to learn about your domain, the best way to do this is to follow  your fellow researchers and researchers and practitioners that are known in your domain. I have learned throughout the years to focus and learn from masters and by taking this information as foundation, trying to build the next steps in my own understanding in the domain. This applies to anything that one does in life. Do not take everything as given, but take the information, analyze it, maybe criticize it and/or improve it and then build the next level of intelligence that you can then educate the community with.

I submitted a blog post yesterday about the importance of Big Data for software vendors and when reading things around the topic, I run into an interesting list that Information-Management.com suggested to be the top 7 list of Analytics Gurus.

  • Mike Gualteiri from Forrester and his Twitter tag is @mgualtieri and his forte based on the web is focused on Big Data, predictive analytics and emerging technology.
  • Vincent Granville from AnalyticsBridge Newsletter and his Twitter tag is @analyticbridge. He publishes a newsletter and focuses in data science, predictive modeling, text mining and business analytics.
  • Doug Laney from Gartner Research with Twitter tag @doug_laney and he focuses on Analytics, Info Innovation & Big Data and the discipline of Infonomics.
  • Leslie Ament from Hypatia Research Group and is listed as “Industry Analyst & Customer Intelligence Researcher with Twitter tag @Hypatia_LeslieA and she focuses on Customer Intelligence and business value of #CRM #BI # Analytics #VOC, #Social Media and #Info Mgmt.
  • Hyon Park  from Nucleus Research with Twitter tag @cambervillechow focuses on #analytics, #bigdata, #collaboration and #socialmedia & #sabermetrics.
  • Gregory Piatetsky from KDNuggests.com with Twitter gat @kdnuggets and he focuses on #analytics, #Big Data #, and #Data Mining
  • Anil Batra with Twitter tag @AnilBatra says he moves beyond web analytics and is working on multi-channel analytics with granular customer level data.

I think you should follow these guys for at least a little while to see what kind of information they share to the community.

Business Analytics is on the rise again with Big Data leading the way

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It is fun to see how some things will just continue being relevant. Business Analytics, Data Warehousing and lately Big Analytics are topping the charts. Based on my own feelings, Big Data really took off the second half of 2012 and we also included that in our business modeling workshops as one optional extension that software vendors (ISVs) should look at. Harvard Business Review brought Big Data to the forefront in its October 1, 2012 magazine with Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson (guru whom I followed when I worked on my PhD) with an article “Big Data: The Management Revolution”. According to the authors, Big Data is far more powerful than analytics of the past, specifically in making predictions.

One of the key reasons for the sudden explosion if Big Data has to do with the urge to achieve competitiveness by getting a better understanding of your customer, its behavior and the only way to do this is to enable massive analysis of data and in the past, this has not been possible with on-premise environments due to scalability issues. With new cloud technology such as Azure Big Data, ISVs and end user organizations can scale up the analytics/calculations based on the need (in bursts) and scale down when the calculation is done. There are quite a few new interesting startups in the Big-data-as-a-service domain (Zoomdata, Bidgely, Ginger.io, AgilOne, Continuuity). I expect this trend to continue specifically as cloud platforms enable startups to innovate without having to invest huge amount of capital in hardware and use the elasticity of the cloud instead.

What I expect to happen during 2013 is that you will hear more about real cases of Big Data use and conferences such as BigData TECHCON appear on your radar screen. Big Data is no longer about if there is technology to do it, it is more about finding the people that understand it and how to utilize it. According to McKinsey & Company, there will be a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the data to make effective decisions”. The McKinsey article breaks down the importance of Big Data very nicely, including things such as dealing with policies around privacy, security, intellectual property and even liability. There is a full report that can be downloaded from McKinsey web-site.

How does all this rely back to software vendors that I work with on a daily basis? If you are an ISV that deal with lots of data, you have to have a game plan for Big Data. Even if you do not care about it, your customers will be asking for it going forward. It is the same what has happened with the Cloud. Three years ago, the question about cloud was almost non-existent in many domains and today an ISV can’t really survive without the cloud. How about that as being a guiding factor for Big Data.

Personally I feel this is very exciting to me as Analytics, Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence has been my core domain for more than 20 years. Even my doctoral dissertation Evaluation of a Product Platform Strategy fro Analytical Application Software from 2004 is still relevant and explains the drivers that a software vendors should be looking at from a software product platform and software product line perspective. The link will download the dissertation (in English) and it is in PDF format.

Expect to hear more about Big Data from me during 2013 as it will be even more relevant than during 2012.

Why software is still relevant and even more so going forward

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When I reflect my past more than 20 years, I have been fortunate enough to be part of the software industry on a global level. First 10 years I spent in Europe working for software companies and the past 15 years I have lived and worked in the US as entrepreneur helping out software companies both domestically and internationally to expand their business.

I happened to run into a blog entry from TechCrunch by Jon Evans where he reflects on Journalism and how everything has become tech. The reference he makes is to a blog entry with the topic Software is eating the world  and is written by  Marc Andreessen whom most of us know already from the Netscape time. Marc Andreesseen is co-founder and general partner in a very well known venture capital company Andreeseen Horowitz with investments in many well known companies such as Facebook, Groupon, Twitter and many more…

When you read the article from Andreessen, there are a few things that confirms some of the things that I have pondering on and also telling my software vendor clients in discussions. Software has not only become a necessity, it has become a must even for traditional hardware companies that one would not think that they need to ponder about software. This trend has been going on for a few years and we see this happening in the for example auto industry and what makes things even more exciting is that cloud technology is now part of this formula of success. Some mature industries are using new cloud technologies to achieve competitive edge towards the rest of the industry.

There are software companies such as MetaCase that will benefit of this trend. This software development tools company is the leading domain-specific modeling software company in the world that has very impressive clients working on embedded software solutions in different industries, including mobility and auto industry. The development environment MetaEdit+ enables organizations to create software product lines more effectively and also with higher quality.

Andreessen claims that we are in the midst of a huge and dramatic technological and economic shift where software companies are poised to take over a large part of the economy. It is easy to see this happening for real. Just think about how insurance companies and financial industry are able to use the cloud to execute heavy-duty risk calculations by submitting the request to the cloud and the only question that the cloud will ask is how much time it can take. Following picture shows pretty nicely how a company with pre-existing infrastructure investment (Datacenter) should view when considering a PaaS environment (Platform-as-a-Service) and in the figure we are referring to Windows Azure.

Azure vs. datacenter

The more capacity is allocated for the calculation, the more it will cost but this cost could easily be justified by opportunities to make more money due to time savings. In the picture above, it is easy to see that there will be a point in time when your own datacenter just does not scale where it needs to scale and that is why solutions/platforms such as Windows Azure will come to the play. This is also why we have to understand that new technologies such as cloud will bring new innovations to the market and this will definitely reflect on the valuations of these companies.

Andreessen gives lots of software related examples from different industries and I have had the luxury to work with many new an innovative (small and large) software companies that are now making this change in a very rapid pace. There will be lots of losers in this game as well. These will be the ones that feel that they already “own” the market and suddenly realize that smaller and more nimble players suddenly take the market and run with it.

The message that I want to send with this blog entry is to really emphasize that ignoring the change that is happening due to multiple factors such as mobility and cloud is probably one of the biggest mistakes that one can make as software leader. I encourage each one of you to do some due diligence in your own operations and answer to this simple question: “ will I still be relevant in 5 years”. If the answer is no, then you might have bigger issues on your hands than just the cloud transformation.

DrSalonen WordPress site is now running natively in Windows Azure environment

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One of the benefits of having some down-time due to holiday season is to be able to do more of things what you can’t do when you are in full swing with work. For me this has meant throughout my career that I do research, write books, study technology or do things when I am not distracted from different things. Now I am listening to the wonderful Swedish singer Eva Dahlgren (got a CD from my wife as Christmas present) and writing this blog entry in late Dallas evening.

Azure-website-001What makes me very excited about this transfer of my WordPress site is that I wanted to upgrade the WordPress platform and get myself ready for 2013 where I will start making blog entries of my experiences that I have gained during 2012. It is time for me to start working on text again as it is already 2 years since I published my latest book. However, due to the projects in the cloud transformation, it has been so fascinating to learn new stuff so I am OK even if I have neglected the writing for a while.

Stay tuned for blog entries during 2013 and later today I will post some of my experiences in this transfer of my WordPress site from a private hosting site to Windows Azure environment.

ISV wakeup call: Cloud and mobility will surge in 2012 according to IDC

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I run a seminar in Finland at Microsoft Finland office 23rd of November for Microsoft ISVs about the transition to the cloud and what it means for software vendors overall. One of the key things in my messaging for ISVs is that they have to look at the cloud together with mobility going forward. This morning I run into an article in Information Management web-site where IDC predicts that mobility and cloud will surge in 2012.

It is easy to agree to this based on what we have seen in our work and research specifically in the US continent. IDC predictions are based on 1000 IDC analysts and according to this study, cloud spending will top $36 billion next year which is four-times the overall IT industry rate of growth.

Another interesting statement from IDC chief analyst Frank Gens is that there will be a “generational shift in the tech platform adoption and innovation” which could according to him lead to a worldwide IT spending of $5 trillion by 2020 and all of this based on mobile tech and the cloud.

Based on hundreds of discussions with independent software vendors (ISVs) around the world we have seen a clear shift in the urgency of many ISVs to ensure that they are on the right bandwagon concerning the cloud. My colleague, Juha Harkonen has been analyzing the trends for quite a while and the observations that he has made are very interesting. You might want to check some of his observations from his excellent blog.

 

 

 

SaaS companies are better valued when compared with traditional software companies according to latest research

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Now it is in the open. According to a recent article from Gigaom.com and research from Martin Wolf M&A Advisors, SaaS companies are getting much higher valuation when compared with legacy software vendors. The chart from Wolf M&A Advisors tells it all:

I knew we would get to this sooner or later as the move is definitely towards the cloud and ISVs that are resisting this move, will eventually run into issues if they do not re-architect their legacy solution as clients will require a true SaaS solution and not a solution that is “running in the cloud” but without really taking advantage of things such as scalability etc.

The Gigacom.com article concludes that it is not a surprise that enterprise vendors acquire smaller SaaS players such as the acquisition of RightNow Technologies by Oracle (1.5 billion). I work with ISVs around the world and I have seen many different types of organizations, some of them being start-ups and some making the transition from legacy business to SaaS business. One very popular way for traditional ISVs to make inroads to SaaS game is to build some type of an extension to the legacy solution to get experience what it is to build for the cloud and this also gives a more evolutionary way of creating something that can be sold to existing customers as add-on service.

I think each and every software executive should contemplate on the message from Gigaom and Martin Wolf especially if the company is in the game of getting sold in the future. The times of high license revenue with maintenance and support is gone and will be sooner or later replaced by monthly/quarterly recurring revenue where the software vendor has to create a solution that is not only used but loved by its users. Gone are the times where a software was sold that was both unfriendly to use but as the software vendor got its money, there was no incentive (other than getting the annual maintenance and support fee paid after first year) to ensure that the software was something that the buyer really liked. In the old-fashioned model, the company paid a large lump sum for the software and this was almost always a lock-in from the software vendor as the end user organization is always fully invested in the solution and is almost forced to pay the maintenance fee in the end. I do remember vividly when I was CEO for a business intelligence company when I was always worried whether our largest clients would pay the support/maintenance fee in the beginning of each year.

 

Cloud ISV: make sure you understand your ecosystem play – example of Intuit and Microsoft collaboration on software platforms to create a foundation for solution developers

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I have written several times in my blogs about ecosystems and the role that ecosystems play. I recently run into an interesting article in the Redmond ChannelPartner with the header “Intuit Extends Cloud Pact with Microsoft”. As I am working with Microsoft ecosystem every single working day, I became interested what the article was all about. Intuit has been building a Partner Platform (IPP) that was reported by Mary-Jo Foley already back in January 2010. I am a longtime QuickBooks Online user so I have a pretty good picture of Intuit’s SaaS delivery model at least from 2003. I believe Intuit was one of the first software companies to introduce a full-blown accounting solution for the SMB market and my company still uses it every single day.

In January 2010 Jeffrey Schwartz reported that Microsoft and Intuit stroke a cloud pact for small business where Windows Azure would be the preferred PaaS platform for Intuit and Intuit App Center.  This value proposition is obviously good for ISVs that can build solutions to the waste QuickBooks ecosystem with integration not only to QuickBooks data but also between QuickBook applications.

The idea behind this Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) is to help developers to build and deploy SaaS applications that are integrated with QuickBooks data and also to give huge exposure for the ISV on the marketplace that Intuit provides for its partners. This marketplace (Intuit App Center) has thousands of applications that can be used with QuickBooks and other QuickBooks third-party solutions.

Let’s look closer to why Intuit and Microsoft need each other. I read an interesting blog entry from Phil Wainewright that includes very interesting remarks about software platform that happens to be the topic of my Ph.D. dissertation (Evaluation of a Product Platform Strategy for Analytical Application Software). The blog entry from Wainewright includes following picture:

 

You can read more about this topic and download Wainewright’s report “Redefining Software Platforms – How PaaS changes the game for ISVs) for Intuit” and this can be found by following this link.

When you review the picture above in more detail, you will find interesting and relevant information how Windows Azure and Intuit IPP platform play together. According to Wainewright, the conventional software platform capabilities are all about functional scope of the development platform whereby cloud platforms add three additional distinct elements according to Wainewright: Multi-tenancy, Cloud Reach and Service delivery capabilities.  The service delivery capabilities have to do with provisioning, pay-as-you-go pricing and billing, service monitoring etc. The multi-tenancy is typically not something that the PaaS platform provides automatically without the application developer building the multi-tenancy logic to the application. I still hear people saying that a legacy application that is migrated to the PaaS platform will automatically become multi-tenant. This is not true as each application has to be re-architected to take advantage of things such as scalability (application increases compute instances based on load).

The idea behind Intuit IPP platform according to Wainewrite is that Intuit has built service delivery capabilities that can be abstracted from the functional platform that is on the left hand side of the picture. The idea that Intuit had initially was to be able to provide support for any PaaS platform to be integrated to the IPP platform which I think is a good idea by not practical considering how fast the PaaS platforms are evolving and the amount of investments that are put into them.

One thing to remember is that all cloud platforms such as Windows Azure has already moved on the horizontal axis whereby the situation and clear cut separation between functional platform and service delivery capabilities is no longer that obvious. This also means that any Microsoft ISV that builds additional infrastructure elements to Windows Azure has to be carefully aligned with Microsoft product teams as there might be a danger to be irrelevant as some third-party functionality will be covered with the functional platform itself (PaaS platform) like Windows Azure. I have seen the same situation with some ISVs working with BizTalk extensions that suddenly have become part of BizTalk itself. Microsoft is very clear with its ISV partners that they should focus on vertical functionality or features that are unlikely to be part of the Microsoft platform in the short-term.

A new post from Jeffrey Schwartz on August 11th, 2011 explains how Intuit IPP and Microsoft Azure will be even more integrated as Intuit will drop its native development stack and instead “focus on the top of the stack to make data and services for developers a top priority” according to Schwartz. In reality this means that Intuit will invest heavily in Windows Azure SDK for IPP and make developing an app on Azure and integrating it to QuickBooks data and IPP’s go-to-market services easy and effective. Microsoft released some more information about this partnership in the Windows Azure blog. The two companies have launched a program for this called “Front Runner for Intuit Partner Program” that explains what the developers get by participating in the program. The site portrays three steps: Develop, Test and Market and there is a video that explains what it means.

So what should we learn from this blog entry? First of all, every development platform (PaaS etc.) will evolve and my recommendation for the ISV is to focus and invest on one that you think is here in the long run. I think this example from Intuit is a great example of a company that was initially in the race of competing in the PaaS space to some extent to conclude that the investments to keep the competition going is just too huge and this led to the conclusion to select Microsoft Azure as the foundation for IPP. Intuit will be much better off by focusing on building logic on-top of Windows Azure by participating in SDK development an ensuring that any solution specific development can be easily integrated into Windows Azure platform. Intuit will therefore focus on providing data and services for developers to use with Windows Azure PaaS platform.

Microsoft has been in the development tools and platform development since its foundation so they are much better off to do those kinds of massive investments. I think this is very smart from Intuit and this enables Intuit to have a scalable solution that developers can rely on even if the decision was not easy according to Liz Ngo from Microsoft. Alex Chriss (Director, Intuit Partner Platform) from Intuit explains this in his blog why Windows Azure is a good foundation for Intuit development. Also, Intuit provides a tremendous opportunity for ISVs like CoreConnext and Propelware report based on the blog from Liz Ngo.

Software ecosystem will continue to evolve and EVERY ISV has to figure out how its solutions will meld to be part of different sub-ecosystems. This will also require efficient and well-defined Application Programming Interfaces (API) from all parties to be able to create an integrated solution based on service oriented architecture (SOA).

Let me known if you know other good examples where software ecosystems mesh nicely with each other.

Cloud ISV: What technology will you be using when supporting different mobile and tablet devices?

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I explained in my previous blog post that the cloud era is here to stay and with this new era, there are also quite a few technologies that the ISV has to select to build a solution. One key thing is to select the cloud platform but an increasingly important technology that the ISV has to evaluate is what development environment to use to support hundreds of different mobility devices, both smart phones as well as tablets.

When I look back not more than five years, the requirements for applications were much different that today when it comes to consuming information. Today, the end user expects to be able to use a smart phone and tablet to view/update information using a solution that typically is built on cloud technology. Flash used to be the main technology to build applications for the Internet browser, but with the decision that Steve Jobs and Apple did on Flash of not supporting Flash on Apple iPad, the success of Flash is doubtful in the future. Consumers do not care about technology, they care about having the ability to consume information and this is something that the technology industry forgets every now and then. If somebody has any doubts about this, just look at what is happening on the US markets and what has happened for example for RIM and BlackBerry market share on smartphones. It is brutal.

Back in 2010, there were quite a few articles of whether HTML5 will kill Flash. There are millions of Flash web sites whereby I do not think Flash will go away anytime soon, but the real question is whether the ISV should believe that Flash is going to survive going forward. My personal opinion is that I would not invest time and money to Flash anymore as we all know it is not going to support all of the relevant mobility interfaces and I do not think that for example RIMs approach by marketing its BlackBerry PlayBook to support Flash makes a difference in the large scheme of things. The question that each ISV needs to evaluate is what technology it expects to support from a long-term application development perspective.

We already know by now, that Flash will not survive in the long run and has already become a major limitation for many ISVs. When you really think about it, users have already won the battle by ignoring the Flash and showing this by buying iPads even if they know it won’t support Flash. Can you afford building sites and ignore the millions information consumers? I do not think so. Many entrepreneurs (me included) have made the decision not to allow any Flash technology  to be used on the web-site as most smart phones and tablets do not support Flash and Flash not optimized either from SEO and SEM perspective. Check your web site analytics/statistics and you will find out that smart phones and tablets are becoming more relevant in information consumption.

I believe that the next wave of innovation will be coming from software vendors that are able to combine the cloud and mobility in a way that helps end user organizations to become more effective and productive in whatever the application area happens to be. I read an interesting article “Building An Enterprise Software Company That Doesn’t Suck” where the author described how large enterprise software packages are losing the appeal from both end user organizations as well as users. People are sick and tired of complicated and hard-to-use software solutions that do not bring any value add to a user’s daily life. Organizations have forced users to use software to fulfill some type of compliance rule but I my bet is that with the new generation of users, this will change whether organizations want it or not. The new generation entering the marketplace is fluent mobility users, they use social networks as we used to use the regular phone and they would not care less about the corporate compliance stuff and based on research, they won’t even apply to organizations that are old-fashioned way of viewing the world.

Technology selections for an ISV business is always tricky and I have had to do this many time during my career and I have also had a few misses such as selecting an application development tool from Synon (acquired by CA) called Obsydian that never really took off in the marketplace and my developers were never really able to use it effectively. The same applies to the selection today in respect to mobility development. Can you afford making a mistake, spend money in development and then suddenly realize that something else should have been used. I do not think so.

I recently read an interesting article “Seven Reasons HTML5 is Killing Flash” with some interesting points of why HTML 5 could potentially kill flash. According to the article, there are more than 109 million mobile users with HTML-5 ready browsers, but by 2016 the estimate according to ABI Research is that there will be more than 2.1 billion mobile users with compatible browsers. According to ABI Research, there will be 25 key features that will make HTML 5 competitive and the seven that was picked in the article are as follows:

1)      Video Play: HTML5 includes a tag for videos that allows it to play with the start, stop, pause etc.

2)      Video Record: This will become even more important going forward as mobile phones have video recording and HTML5 will support this

3)      Audio Play/Record: Today, the user needs, Flash, QuickTime or Java to play or record audio, but with HTML5 it is just another tag.

4)      Apps: HTML5 allows Web pages to access the same routines that make browsers work and enables them to become like any application. I think this is one of the key things when you think about mobile application development using HTML5

5)      Rich 2D Graphics: All types of sophisticated two-dimensional graphics will be built into HTML5

6)      IM: Instant messaging will be built into HTML5 by virtue of Web sockets

7)      Real-time Streams: Web sockets will also allow any Web-page designer to easily add real-time data streams to the application.

HTML5 could become the best friend for the ISVs going forward as it will provide the broadest support from a device/browser perspective and when smart phones will get HTML5 compliant Internet browsers. HTML provides a better way to support multiple devices as is explained in the article “Enterprise App Stores Harness HTML5” by Colin Johnson.