Happy New Year to all!

Everybody does it, so here are my inferences for ‘06:

BPMS will go mainstream
With BPEL gaining support for distributed transactions and human workflow while BPMN is receiving the blessing of the OMG, industry standards are making the BPMS ready for mainstream adoption. Just in time for Gartner to release the first BPMS magic quadrant in Q1 ‘06. Hint: keep an eye on Intalio, which is about to change the economics of the game (disclaimer: I work for them).

Industry consolidation will accelerate
Last year saw the enterprise application market consolidate around two major players, Oracle and SAP. This year should see similar consolidation at the middleware level, while mid-tier application vendors will find it increasingly difficult to compete with Oracle and SAP on one end and Microsoft on the other. Question: when—and it’s a when, not an if—will IBM come back to the enterprise application game? Software as a service might be a good way of doing it without alienating much-needed partners.

Office 2.0 will become a reality
Learning from the failed experiment of office.com in 1999, a new breed of Web 2.0-branded application service providers have released AJAX powered prototypes of online office productivity suites last year. I call it Office 2.0 and expect this year’s prototypes to mature to the point where they actually become usable. Pioneers will give way to early adopters and very interesting things should ensue. Google, but even more so Yahoo!, should make several low-profile acquisitions in the space. Microsoft: get ready for some healthy competition! Question: why is Google interested at all by a fat client office productivity suite? This totally escapes me.

Software off-shoring will go further West
Sky-high employee turnover in India makes it impossible to capitalize on past investments, while intelectual property issues in China make off-shoring of core software developments a very risky proposition. Eastern Europe, with costs that are getting close to India’s, single-digit yearly employee turnover, great talent pools and cultural proximity makes for a great alternative. Hint: Western Ukraine is a good place to start with today.

Open Source business models will prove themselves
Last year saw new open source players such as SugarCRM come out of nowhere and shake the foundations of established enterprise software markets. In the new year, expect open source vendors to emerge in most market segments and to successfully establish hybrid business models that blend open source code and commercial software. Hint: when going the Open Source way, don’t forget to check the IP integrity of your software with tools such as Palamida.

All software will go the service way
Value Added Network: expired. Application Service Provider: tired. Software as a Service: wired. Names might change, but concepts remain the same, and this is a winning one. With Salesforce.com’s successful IPO last year, the investment community is looking at enterprise software again. With Open Source, this might very well be the only way to start a new venture today. Everything that does not require massive computing power on the client side—CAD, video editing and gaming are obvious exceptions—will go online. The benefits are just too many for it not to happen. Question: how will we deal with security concerns without having to package the service into an appliance?

SOA will get more complex
With the multiplication of standards for SOA and the layering of new technologies on top of an already thick stack, some are starting to suggest the development of a WS-Complexity specification. For SOA to succeed, we need to ensure that it remains simpler than past efforts at establishing distributed computing architectures. We might have to wait for 2007 to see the release of WS-Simplicity. Advice: look for Open Source implementations of an Enterprise Service Bus, they are a good insurance policy against changing technologies.

Corporations will discover the beauty of social
LinkedIn has proven to be the most efficient recruiting tool around. Wikipedia has passed ahead the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica and vendors such as Socialtext are bringing wiki to the enterprise. Corporate blogging is gaining momentum. In 2006, employees will discover new ways of making friends and their employers will encourage it. When capital meets social, interesting things happen. Question: who will come first with aggregation tools for linking multiple social networking sites together?

Standards for online services will emerge
Last year, RSS has proven to be a simple yet effective way of syndicating content. More is needed to enable the convergence of online services into a unified platform. This year, look for many more initiatives like Structured Blogging to “untangle the web” and connect the pieces together. Tip: if you cannot wait, give SuprGlu a try.