Some software buyers agree. "The number of software vendors will definitely get smaller and smaller," says Mani Shabrang, head of technology deployment and research and development in Dow Chemical Co.'s business-intelligence center. But as vendors of mature software categories such as enterprise resource planning consolidate, he says, vendors of new types of software will spring up. Shabrang foresees a new generation of tools for visualizing data and intelligent software that doesn't just mine text but recognizes the tone and meaning of written prose.
Others believe there will be just as many, if not more, software vendors in the future as there are today. But new companies will develop higher-level applications, leaving the markets for infrastructure software, middleware, and even core applications such as ERP to a few major players, says Danny Sabbah, chief technology officer of IBM's software group.
"Roughly every two or three years, new software categories appear," says Gerald Cohen, CEO of business-intelligence software vendor Information Builders Inc. "As long as there's a venture-capital industry, there will be new categories of software."
There's no consensus on what the next killer application will be, but emerging service-oriented architecture technology is likely to provide the foundation for a new generation of software applications. (See "Apps To Die For") In contrast to today's model of vendors developing ever-larger applications that can take months to install, the software of the future will be made up of components, many of them developed in-house by the businesses that need them.
One direction software may take is to move from integrating business processes within a company to integrating these processes between companies, Sabbah says. For instance, such applications might link ordering, invoicing, and inventory-management tasks up and down a supply chain within an industry.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
