Blog: Shawn Rogers: The Future of Software

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The Future of Software

Marc Benioff Chairman and CEO of Salesfoce.com did a great job this morning here at Informatica World outlining the Future of Software. Overall I had to agree with much of what Marc covered. It’s a highbred version of what makes up WEB 2.0 but is more closely directed to how Software as a Service (SaaS) is defined.

Here is a quick overview of what Marc feels makes up the 10 requirements for software of the future

1. Multi-Tenant, Shared Systems – Using a single instance of an application to serve customers.
2. Trusted Reliability and Performance – Must have 99.9% and sub 300 Milliseconds per transaction. Has to be a transparent service
3. Democratization of Enterprise Applications –needs to serve 1 – 10,000 users all in the same fashion
4. Metadata-Driven Customization – The ability for SaaS users to define and customize the application – Language, business terms etc.
5. Mash-Ups –Leveraging the community and other services seemlesly into the application (see www.housingmaps.com or www.flickermap.com )
6. Web Services-based Integration – The web service API must be standard based to achieve the snap on functionality and collaboration demanded
7. Development as a Service -See my previous post on Informatica’s PowerCenter Connect for Salesforce.com
8. Application Exchanges - The ability to add and embed applications quickly and easily (www.konfabulator.com )
9. Multi-Application Delivery – The ability to define access to applications and bundle them together to suite the needs of users on the fly.
10. Multi-Device Delivery – Write the application once and run it everywhere, Blackberry, Palm, KDDI/Brew etc.