From the Editors: Hurray! The enterprise is exciting again!
By SD Times Editorial Board
February 1, 2013 —
(Page 1 of 2)
It has been 14 years since SD Times (and SDTimes.com) hit the streets, and since then, the Great Wheel of History has rotated quite a few times.
We saw Java come, go, and come back again.
We watched the consumer Web take over the world through sites like Yahoo, Google and Facebook.
We witnessed the demise of hundreds of companies and their hyped technologies, whether through disuse, competitive acquisition or irrelevance.
Lately, we haven’t seen much public interest around enterprise IT; the focus has been on consumer tech. Indeed, other than a brief wave of excitement around enterprise service buses, it has been quite a while since the enterprise was as exciting as it is right now.
In Silicon Valley and around the world, enterprise software is where investors have decided to place their money. After years of focusing on consumers in software, investors have awakened to the fact that enterprises are great customers with very deep pockets. And, perhaps more importantly, developers have long known that enterprise software tends to be stale, stuffy and business-like.
Tell that to Atlassian, AppDirect, GitHub and Splunk. With the NoSQL movement in full swing and the mobile revolution well behind us now, the metaphorical enterprise has uncrossed his arms and come down off the mountain to see just what all this hubbub is about. In seconds, a decision-maker can have access to data from all across the company through RESTful APIs that give access to huge clusters of computers, all working to solve problems for pennies on the dollar.
Despite this perfect storm of enterprise-friendly technology, there are other factors at play here. During the financial meltdown and the ensuing two years of economic troubles, investors lined up to put their dough into consumer-focused startups, and to bring such companies to the public markets.
Anyone who has checked stock tickers recently, however, can clearly see that those investments didn't always pan out. With examples like the Facebook IPO, Zynga's struggles and the colossal failure of mega-startup Color, investors have taken black eyes in software startups despite the seeming economic dominance of Silicon Valley.
Not only is the enterprise ready to embrace all this new technology, investors may be ready to embrace those who would develop a company to sell to enterprises. And it certainly doesn't hurt that it's easier than ever to sell software and services to business customers: Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services have both shown that self-service enterprise software is not only viable, it's the right way to go.
If you are working in enterprise software, 2013 is going to be a great year. We are excited to see such interest in making businesses run more smoothly.
Related Search Term(s): enterprise development, Mono
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