Software service market in 2014 seven major forecast

Although most enterprise software is still deployed within the enterprise, SaaS will continue to grow rapidly. Market research firm Gartner predicts that the software-as-a-service market in 2015 will grow from $ 14 billion in 2012 to $ 22 billion. As vendors compete for competitive position and users continue to shift their IT strategy to deployment models, the software services market will see major changes and new trends in 2014. Here are some forecasts for the 2014 software services market.

1. Multi-tenancy issues: Software service vendors such as Salesforce.com have long been advocating the benefits of multi-tenancy. Multi-tenancy is a software architecture. In this architecture, users need to share an application instance and save their own information alone. Multitenancy allows vendors to apply patches and updates to many users at the same time, using more underlying infrastructure to cut costs and ease management. However, there have been other variants of multi-tenancy this year, such as a multi-tenant format offered by Oracle's new 12c database. An option for this release allows users to host many "pluggable" databases in a single host database. Oracle said it is safer than the application-level multitenancy architecture used by Salesforce.com and other vendors. Salesforce.com itself has freed itself from the original definition of multi-tenancy. At the Dreamforce conference in November, Marc Benioff, chief executive, announced that it has partnered with Hewlett-Packard in offering large new "Superpod" options. As a result, organizations have their own dedicated infrastructure in the Salesforce.com data center based on HP Converged Infrastructure hardware. Some people may argue that this approach is almost indistinguishable from traditional application hosting. In general, multi-tenancy will no longer be an important topic for software services in 2014.

2. Mixed Software Services: Oracle has proven that its Fusion applications can be deployed in-house or from the cloud. However, due to the complexity of the first choice, most of the original Fusion users chose software services. However, the concept of an application code base that can move between two deployment modes will become even more prevalent in 2014. Since there is no sign that Salesforce.com will provide an option for on-premise deployments, it's almost inconceivable that Salesforce.com's "No Software" logo and unscrambled marketing activities around software services are considered. The partnership with Hewlett-Packard obviously means offering an eclectic choice to large businesses that are still worried about traditional software services. As in all cases, customer needs will determine the next step for software service providers.

3. Geographic depth: Oracle co-president Mark Hurd recently mentioned in Oracle conference earnings conference call that Oracle currently has 17 data centers around the world is not by accident. Manufacturers want their business users to know that their software service offerings are built for disaster recovery and are widely available. China martens, an independent business applications analyst, expects software service providers to announce in 2014 that they will open a large number of data centers around the world. This is another move that benefits end-user companies. At the moment, some companies may not be able to handle software applications, either regional or global, due to a lack of local data center support. Local data center support is also regulated by national data storage laws or privacy laws.

4. Maintain customer satisfaction: Oracle and SAP and other enterprise deployment of enterprise software companies are now enhancing their own knowledge. This knowledge was learned by software vendors such as NetSuite and Salesforce.com a few years ago. This knowledge is how to run a software business based on annual subscription revenue rather than a software business based on permanent software licenses and annual maintenance revenue. After receiving high-margin technical support costs, the latter model will bring a lot of one-time manufacturers revenue. Using the software service model, money flows into the vendor's wallet in different ways. Compared with the internal deployment of the enterprise, this model is very easy for the dissatisfied users to turn to competitors' products. As a result, software service vendors suffer a loss of users. According to Karan Mehandru, a general partner at venture capital firm Trinity Ventures, in 2014, the focus will be increasingly on keeping customers happy.

5. Integration of Marketing and Human Capital Management Software: Analyst Martens pointed out that as vendors acquire their own competitors and partners, the software services market is expected to see more M & A activity. Human Capital Management (HCM) and marketing software companies may find themselves on the takeover. Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com have invested heavily in these areas. However, IBM and Hewlett-Packard may feel the need to participate in this game. Less likely is the significant merger between software services vendors such as Salesforce.com and Workday.

6. Software Services Enter the Vertical Market: Martens said software vendors will have more levels of application as vendors build or acquire software-service offerings to attract specific types of end-user companies. In particular, vendors will continue to build early industry versions of their applications or tailor-made software services for vertical markets such as healthcare, manufacturing and retail. However, users will have to figure out how deep the specific industry functions of these applications are and how they are committed to developing a particular market.

7. Can not own software service without platform service: Salesforce.com challenged its competitors in November and released Salesforce1, an upgraded version of its Platform Services (PaaS). The software is bundled with the Force.com product, which includes Heroku and ExactTarget's tools acquired by Salesforce.com. This is a new mobile application, with 10 times more application programming interfaces (APIs) than before. Platform services are an enhancement of software service companies and create a large number of developers and system integrators. They create application plugins and serve customers while sharing the benefits of vendor success. Oracle, SAP and other software services vendors have been building their own platform services offerings, and will be promoting them vigorously next year.