The cloud is here and nobody will be able to stop this trend! So what’s going on within the cloud?
At first all kind of applications we are still using locally will find the way into a SaaS application. But we still need local mobile apps in situations when we do not have an internet connection. That means that our data will not be fully mobile and a copy of all the things we are working on is stored locally and synchronized when we have an internet connection.
Next, for me a big future trend is an extended PaaS like Development-as-a-Service, where everything is stored and developed in the cloud. There are some solutions yet, but we still need a more and better integrated stack. What I mean is a combination of SaaS plus PaaS, a powerfull solution which implements the whole stack including the image of a company. Just call it „Company Service Broker“. This is for example a broker who is putting the services a company needs together e.g. ERP and CMS. So you do not need one account for each service you have to authorized with. It’s one platform which integrates everything into one application/ frontend with a single sign on for the enduser.
For me it’s inconvenient to work with more than one application. I always have to open up to 5+ browser windows and authorized for each service. So we have the same situation we know from on premise solutions – isolated applications for each problem. One solution for CMS, one for ERP etc. As an example for SaaS: GMail and Salesforce plus other applications. Honestly the integration between Salesforce and Google Apps is not well-engineered so far.
Bottom line: there is a need for one (cloud) interface to the customer.
Image sources: http://www.freshcharacters.com, http://notetoself.us,
