Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Innovation from Customers - And Not Companies

If you observe the whole web 2.0 happenings its an innovation driven by the customers/Internet users.

Influenced by the predominant growth of web 2.0 techniques (not real technologies though), major vendors are being pushed to a situation where they need to brand their latest products as web 2.0 compliant.

Example, IBM is releasing latest portal product with AJAX support, upgrading its Lotus suite of products for business social networking and Peope Search. Microsoft is comingup with lot more features in its latest 2007 release - RSS integration, AJAX support, Social Networking within the Enterprise, Blogs and Wikis.

SAP is comingup with upgrades in the support of Rich Internet Applications.

Google search has entered into the corporate and More and more vendors are lining up to provide search solutions

So more and more, the customer experience on the Internet is driving the Product / Technology Innovations and eventually they will have an impact on Corporates as well.

The solutions rolled-out by the corporates to end-customers are invariably internet users and they would expect the same kind of experience that they get in other sites.

The business solutions that innovatively incorporates these new user experience paradigms are bound to win!

Monday, February 05, 2007

Disruptive Technologies

Over the lunch, I was discussing the IT trends with my colleagues. And one person was quoting on the use of 'Disruptive Technologies'. If there are disruptive technologies to come in future, probably the trends will change. The trend in which indian IT industry works.

The recent story by Business Today claims that the productivity per employee is declining year on year for the past five years for the Indian IT companies. But they are able to show growth in revenues and profits by the sheer size of the company - by adding more and more people.

My point of view was - It will not be 'Disruptive Technologies' that will change the business. It will be 'Disruptive Business Models brought by New Emerging technologies' will change the business of IT.

So far, it was 'SOA' that was claimed as one of prominent Disruptive Architecture (Not a Technology though). But, the implementation of SOA is as complicated as a J2EE platform, that it is holding many people from jumping to SOA world. Or the People who have already taken the deep dive are finding it difficult to breath because of various issues such as Governance, Funding Model, Performance, etc.

So It really remains to be seen which technology would be the next disruptor.