364 days ago, I published my inferences for ‘06. A year has passed, and time has come to take a look back and see how good (or bad) I did back then. Tomorrow, I will publish a new batch, and review them a year from now.

BPMS will go mainstream: Draw
The concept for a Business Process Management System (BPMS) has been gaining momentum, but I would not call it mainstream yet. The ground for BPM 2.0 has been laid, and the first Open Source BPMS has been announced. Nevertheless, customers are still trying to figure out what BPM really is, and which flavor for it will best address their needs initially. Gartner recently came to the rescue, suggesting that an Open Source solution might be a good way to get your feet wet initially. But a commonly-accepted compeling event for the deployment of a BPM platform — think e-Commerce for an application server — remains to be found. SOA might very well be it, but it’s losing ground as well, as illustrated on this Google Trends analysis, also mentioned in this earlier post. Like it or not, BPM is a complex concept, and it will take time for corporate buyers to get their arms around it. In the meantime, the best way to get there is to lower any possible barrier to adoption, and this is what Intalio is all about.

Industry consolidation will accelerate: Miss
No game-changing mergers or acquisitions were made in the enterprise software space this year, and IBM did not come back to the enterprise application game. Smaller deals have been stealing the show, especially Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss, which must have compelled Oracle to finally make a move on the Linux front. The real question now comes down to this: how long will Salesforce.com remain as an independent company? IBM, Oracle, and SAP would all make pretty good buyers. Another option would be for Marc to finally extend his platform with ERP functionality, which could be achieved in several ways, one of them being to acquire Compiere or Intacct. Let’s hope the later comes true.

Office 2.0 will become a reality: Hit
Within less than nine months, the Office 2.0 Database, announced on this post, grew from nothing to over 330 applications. The concept introduced exactly a year ago got its first conference, with over 450 participants, 105 speakers, and 56 sponsors. Zoho emerged as a likely winner in the space, and ThinkFree demonstrated that web browsers are now powerful enough to support most of the features that are offered by traditional Office 1.0 productivity suites today [Disclaimer: I serve as an advisor for both companies]. Google’s release of
Google Docs on the first day of the Office 2.0 Conference also gave a clear signal that things are getting serious now, and that past involvements with OpenOffice.org were just smoke and mirrors. Next year, it will be interesting to see wether Microsoft finally releases something of substance under the Office Live brand, and who gets their hands on ThinkFree. The later would be a perfect acquisition for Google, but in the meantime an OEM deal with Intuit or Salesforce.com would make a lot of sense as well. Investors might also be interested to know that the company is giving serious thoughts to the idea of raising a small round of venture funding…

Software off-shoring will go further West: Hit
If your Indian off-shoring partner made you lose sleep over high employee turn-over, you might have considered going further West. During the past year, Eastern European countries such as Ukraine became a popular destination for the off-shoring of software development projects, so much so that the unescapable law of supply and demand kicked back in full swing. And because these countries are so much smaller than India, its effects were felt stronger, faster. Down the road, it seems that off-shoring is a dynamic process rather than a singular event, for which target destinations keep changing as local markets mature. Next steps? Latin America, Northern Africa, and China of course.

Open Source business models will prove themselves: Hit
Following on the footsteps of JBoss and SugarCRM, more and more enterprise software companies went the Open Source way, including Hyperic, Intalio, and Terracotta. Learning valuable lessons from their predecessors, many commercial Open Source upstarts are being liberal with licensing terms, which compelled some industry observers to challenge their claims. Next year should see a clarification of the rules, with the addition of generally agreed-upon terms for attribution to the ever more popular Mozilla Public License (MPL), with the blessing of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) hopefully.

All software will go the service way: Hit
Alongside the emergence of credible Office 2.0 solutions, all categories of software saw the release of online alternatives, including drawing, music playing, and video editing. A year ago, guessing the next category of software to go online was challenging. Today, the game has changed, and the challenge is to identify the one that will be the last. At this point, only one application is missing from my Office 2.0 Setup: a good online accounting tool.

SOA will get more complex: Hit
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was supposed to make integration simpler. Instead, it made everything a lot more complex, and the introduction of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) did not really help. Standards for Web Services kept multiplying, and the market kept fragmenting itself, with the Java Business Integration (JBI) API on one side, and slightly more pragmatic approaches such as Apache Axis on the other. Too many options create confusion, which vendors of proprietary solutions are the only ones to benefit from. Clarity and simplicity are much needed, but I’m not sure where they’ll come from next year.

Corporations will discover the beauty of social: Hit
LinkedIn will most likely sign its tenth million users in the coming quarter, and TIME Magazine named You (and that includes Me) as Person of the Year. Most searches made on Google return entries from Wikipedia within the top ten results, while the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) usually tops official websites developed by major studios for any new movie. During this past year, the corporate world started to pay attention, and the concept for Enterprise 2.0 was born, followed by commercial implementations such as Intel’s SuiteTwo. Next year should see an acceleration of the trend, with more and more practical use cases and success stories being released.

Standards for online services will emerge: Hit
Bugs have been added to the Office 2.0 Bug Tracker faster than standards have been released to fix them, nevertheless, a couple of initiatives have been gaining some significant traction, among them JSON and OpenID. Also, and against all expectations, Amazon started to release a set of commodity services (EC2, S3, SQS) for online computing that’s giving us a very good preview of things to come. Next year should see Google and Microsoft following on Jeff’s footsteps. The creation of a full fledge standardization body for Office 2.0 is not out of the question either.

Score: 7 Hits, 1 Miss, 1 Draw
Let’s call it a 83% success rate. Not too bad… In fact, it’s a little bit too good, and the reason for it might be that my inferences for ‘06 were a little bit too open ended. For next year’s, I will try to be a little bit more specific, which should make the challenge more interesting. See you next year!