Add to cartTwo pivotal events in the Enterprise 2.0 market for 2008 have already occurred, and they happened on the same day: January 16. Oracle acquired BEA, and Sun acquired MySQL, the open source software (OSS) database provider. The acquisitions were not that earthshaking in and of themselves. The first change in the overall information technology (IT) market takes a key IT choice away from users, business and IT service providers and smaller independent software vendors (ISVs). This group preferred a healthy independent middleware market as a counterweight to dependence on the leading application suppliers and/or the leading infrastructure software suppliers for middleware. The second change means the multiple-year trend in which the leading IT suppliers take over the OSS movement has picked up speed. OSS as a separate market dynamic should cease to affect share valuations by about 2010. OSS will continue as a “secondary trend,” of course, because it represents terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) that affect software development. In fact, OSS Ts&Cs have existed in the IT market under various other names for 50 years.
While these two trends are most important in Enterprise 2.0 investment research in 2008, we believe there are three others that will drive both user decisions and Enterprise 2.0 supplier share valuations:
• The movement away from technology-centricity toward business-service-centricity, as exemplified by IBM and most likely Microsoft and SAP.
• The ability of those Enterprise 2.0 market participants who choose to remain technology-centric to execute top-to-bottom stack plans; EMC, Oracle and Sun and possibly HP are the leading examples.
• Enterprise 2.0 software’s increasing ability to deal with unstructured data; the other leading Enterprise 2.0 suppliers mentioned above particularly need to catch up with Google