News > Business

By Staff, ZDNet Asia
Friday, March 14, 2008 06:39 PM

Steve Russell, president and CEO, Asia-Pacific, Salesforce.com

	Steve Russell, Salesforce.com
	Every major vendor acknowledged that the future of software industry is not tied to a set of heterogeneous software delivered on CDs, but to a set of heterogeneous services delivered over the Internet.

Q. What do you remember as the biggest industry news for 2007?
Russell: Every major vendor acknowledged that the future of software industry is not tied to a set of heterogeneous software delivered on CDs, but to a set of heterogeneous services delivered over the Internet--services that are scalable, reliable, available and offers ease of integration.

Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and many others are now pursuing the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model that salesforce.com has been pioneering for almost a decade. Whether they in fact survive this market-driven shift may well be the biggest industry news in the next few years.

Gartner issued a report warning IT heads to prepare a recession budget. What is your view?
Gartner have also reported that "US$8 out of every US$10 spent on IT is dead money--not contributing directly to business change or growth".

The reality is that too much money spent on IT is allocated to simply keeping the lights on. I would expect that a recession, while not desired, would accelerate the adoption of SaaS as IT heads more proactively seek alternatives to current software distribution and licensing models, which are characterized by the seemingly endless and costly install-update-upgrade cycles.

Name three hot technologies to watch in 2008, and explain why.
1) Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Companies are increasingly wanting to manage all of their business information on-demand. I expect that companies will increasingly embrace PaaS (platform vs. applications) to develop, customize, integrate and deploy an endless range of applications beyond CRM.

2) Application Directories: Companies will increasingly source their applications as services over the Internet. Common aggregation points--directories such as The AppExchange--will become the starting point for evaluating software applications

3) Social networking becomes ubiquitous: Companies will tap the "wisdom of crowds" (employees, customers, partners, etc.) to set strategy. To do so, they will leverage Web 2.0 technology to build business-oriented communities in a similar fashion to consumer Web sites such as Facebook. A great example is Dell's IdeaStorm.

The biggest challenge facing IT departments is...
... Not making decisions that they will regret in three years' time. There has never been more innovation in the software industry than there is today. The rules of how software is developed, delivered and consumed are fundamentally changing. Savvy IT departments are increasingly realizing how to provoke an unprecedented level of business innovation without a heavy reliance on infrastructure and large capital budgets.

Just as we saw the evolution of CIO from Chief Infrastructure to Chief Information Officers in the last decade, next generation CIOs will be focused on business innovation (Chief Innovation Officers), enabling enterprises with extremely agile business models.

IT needs a new vision for software...not simply another version of it. This vision is "Innovation. Not Infrastructure".

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