Ray Lane, an ex Oracle veteran, spoke at the Software 2006 event on what’s next for the software industry. According to the blog reports the theme seemed to be that some “rethinking” was required on the part of the entire software industry and enterprise software in particular.
Now, I’m not going to try to tell you that a company using Flash can take on Oracle or Microsoft, but I will tell you that the themes which are going to be important in the future of enterprise software are all things the Flash platform can accomplish very easily.
To quote the article:
The key themes, buttressed by cheaper and cheaper broadband, improved storage, etc., for enterprise software going forward include:
- Collaboration
- Virtualization
- Convergence
- On demand
- Contextual search
- Anytime, anywhere
- Anonymous connection
- Visualized search
Many of those themes are things that Adobe has thought of and addressed with Flex and the Flash Platform. Flex Enterprise Services provides Collaboration, Convergence and On demand. Apollo is going to give us the Anytime, anywhere aspect.
Flash is a phenomenal enterprise solution. It allows for the “nimbleness” which the software of the future is going to need to embrace, while providing the benefits of the web with the power of a rich development environment. As the software industry changes, niches will open up for smaller companies using Flash. Eventually the big companies will follow (or acquire the small companies) which is why it’s so exciting to be a part of the Flash world right now.
I meant to mention this a couple of weeks back but just didn’t get a chance to. I’ve noticed that I’m being aggregated by Feed Squirrel which is a new Adobe aggregator. It’s got a pretty slick interface and is a good way to get a snapshot of the community.