September - 2005 issue > Feature

By Rahul Sood

Claims about the maturation of the software industry and death of innovation have been debated to death. Not without reason. Almost 50 percent of the top 50 application software companies that existed in 2000 have been acquired in the last 5 years.

Even with the so-called recovery IT spending levels have barely reached the historical levels IT as in the year 2001. Steep discounting has become the norm, as the IT market has turned into a buyers market. But does this necessarily qualify as being a mature industry. If maturity is defined as “being fully developed to a complete or final stage” or “not subject to major change”; it is clear that the software industry is not fully mature. Most CIOs will agree that this is not how they would describe their software infrastructure. In fact, some would argue that their problem is the exact opposite – too many moving parts and not enough stability or predictability.

If the industry is still evolving then in which area are we are likely to see biggest changes or discontinuities? The barely visible changes in the horizon are likely to redefine the software landscape in the coming years.

Here we highlight 5 key areas that are likely to see dramatic changes in enterprise software.

Explosive growth of user population
Tech Strategy Partners estimates the total cumulative seats sold by enterprise application software companies to be less than 50 million, which is only 10 percent of the global organized sector working population of 500 million.

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