Excellent article. As a SaaS company, we have focused on customer service and support. Our focus has empowered CIOs to be more successful. CIOs can more effectively leverage company-based IT resources to focus on strategic, high-impact projects and leave the day-to-day application support to us. We believe this is the future of business process applications and will continue to drive productivity gains as end-users find themselves happier with their software. This will only serve to drive up user adoption and lead to more business success. Morris Panner, CEO, OpenAir, mpanner@openair.com

Once again Gartner has demonstrated why it is viewed as a lagging indicator of meaningful market trends. To call any of these existing trends potentially disruptive in 2010 is to ignore the significant impact each of them is already having on the software industry today. Web mash-ups became the play things of the Facebook crowd over a year ago and is already being used by a wide array of companies of all sizes. That same Facebook generation has already brought their social networks into the corporate environment, making Gartner's suggestion that "By 2015, no company will be able to build or sustain a competitive advantage unless it capitalizes on the combined power of individualized behaviors, social dynamics and collaboration" ludicrous. "Revolutionary Changes in Software and How it is Consumed" are already well underway and will be yesterday's news by 2010. Gartner may be right that the "Software Market Moves to Megavendors Supporting Large Ecosystems" but it won't be SAP if today's patterns are any indication. Instead, it will be Google, Amazon and Salesforce.com leading a new generation of SaaS and cloud computing providers.

I think that everyting Gartner says is true - but it isn’t that futuristic - just extrapolating from the trends we are seeing now in early adopters. As William Gibson wrote “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”.

The first three disruptors boil down to the fact that there is a new type of user out there, and they are becoming more vocal about having control over the tools and applications they use. They are mostly "knowledge workers" and they exemplify the paradox in human behavior that is valuable for designers of applications to keep in mind: Everyone wants to be in control, but nobody wants to be controlled.

What I think Gartner is missing is that software is going to have to evolve to support a new type of work, not just a new type of worker.The next generation of enterprise software is going to have to provide much better support for knowledge work processes. Lotus Notes, MS SharePoint and Wikis are a start in providing support for collaboration - but not for the processes - which include individualized behaviour and social dynamics. Enterprises are going to need tools for the 80% of human centric business processes that are currently handled through ad-hoc use of email and documents - what I call a Human Process Management System "(HPMS)". These tools will be extensions of the way people use email and documents today as their basic framework for tacit interactions (or human processes) with a focus on traceability and flexibility rather than control.

As usual Jeff is right on the money and the predictions in this article are a bit like betting on a race that is already 2/3rds run.

There are organizations out there that are not following these trends yet, but once they see the speed to market and reduced risk that their competitors are realizing by implementing SaaS solutions, that situation will quickly change. And if that doesn’t do it, the growing influx of Gen Y people certainly will.

I have been in the IT business long enough to see the switch from a time when developers were viewed as having some sort of special powers, to people that the Gen Y folks see as simply in their way. And if IT can’t deliver in a timeframe acceptable to them then they will just go around you and implement something they use at home. Watch out!

Barry Houldsworth, President, SaasSmart Inc.

These are a few trends of many we're seeing now, and broad ones at that, but admittedly four to be reckoned with. In our market there are strong competitive and financial pressures for all of the Gartner points, though the fourth is unlikely to take root for organizational reasons. The comments on this article are correct: this is a race already being run, but the analyst does recognize that fact: "Market excitement over Web platforms, SaaS and other IT utility services will only intensify, and this will increase business buyers' appetites for these new options and services." View it as a nice focus article.

Given almost everything in the article is already happening, and is in fact accelerating, the main point of controversy here is whether the heritage mega-vendors will continue to lead. I believe the transition from old-style on-premises computing to cloud computing as SaaS is every bit as disruptive as that from the mainframe to the client server world. And look at how few of the dominant vendors from the mainframe days are still in leadership positions today.

I've written a lot about the innovator's dilemma that today's heritage mega-vendors face in the new world of cloud computing and SaaS on my SaaS 2.0 Blog. While the mega vendors have the most resources today, the innovator's dilemma makes it clear that they will also have the hardest time making the transition to the new world - it's just that different from what they do today.

My own prediction is that within 10 years there will be a whole new set of dominant companies on the rise, with today's heritage on-premises enterprise software folks on the decline.

Thanks for the feedback. The point of the presentation was less about any one of these individual disruptors and more about the exploding effect of all of them across the breadth of the software industry. It was also about the likelihood that they all mature at about the same time (in the next five years) causing massive disruption to a market that has been relatively stable since Y2K (vendors and users alike). This presentation was a lead-in to many other presentations at the event in Orlando where each of these disruptors, their effects on market providers and users along with user advice were covered in depth.