IDC published a number of predictions studies in late 2006 and early 2007 with
analysts’ views on the software market drivers for 2007 and beyond. Key predictions
excerpted from these documents include:

• Web 2.0 will make applications more user and community oriented for easier use and collaboration. Web 2.0 technologies will be increasingly utilized as significant numbers of start-ups launch a wide variety of lightweight business products and hosted services in a series of application markets. In addition, established solution providers will introduce Web 2.0 into their product portfolios, either as new functionality in the latest versions of existing products or as entirely new offerings. Individuals, teams, and entire online communities such as partner ecosystems will be able to create situational project or networking sites that make it easy to share and create information that is of interest or required. The primary factor that could keep Web 2.0 from taking off as fast as the solution providers hope is wariness that both IT and business executives may feel about embracing Web 2.0 concepts before understanding how they will affect existing business systems and processes. Despite its appeal to individuals, Web 2.0 may seem more of a distraction than a distinction for the people responsible for keeping organizations running smoothly. In many real-world organizations, however, the adoption of Web 2.0 will begin in 2007 but will take several years due to the slow, deliberate pace at which IT and business management often make decisions that could have far-reaching implications for the way business applications are created, consumed, and managed.
• The battle for information platform leadership will shift into high gear. Information is the last of the big dynamic IT platforms up for grabs, and easily the most important. Customers consistently identify “rapid access to relevant information” among the top business requirements for IT. Coherent information access and management are becoming more critical as a necessary backbone for SOA implementations. IDC believes that a generic information access platform must include merged access and analytical tools for both data and content. Information access platform offerings from search, BI, and large software vendors all have slightly different flavor due to the technology strengths of the vendor. Integrated information access and analysis platforms have already demonstrated that they can increase revenue in ecommerce, decrease the costs of customer service, avoid the risks of product recalls, and mine public opinion. For vendors, these platforms usually require extensive services to implement a growing revenue stream. These implementations will also foster the growth of partner networks, with partners supplying the domain expertise in an uneasy duet with the software vendor.
• Search will become embedded in any information-intensive application, providing a single point of access to both data and content across multiple applications and repositories. Extended search platforms that include search, categorization, visualization, and some elements of “BI lite” will become the first point of access to information in the enterprise. In addition, elements of search,
  text mining, analytics, clustering, and question answering will be embedded in customer-facing applications. CRM, business intelligence, collaboration, and workflow applications will embed information access technologies to facilitate online self-help, customer service, knowledge management, and ecommerce interactions.
• Open source software will disrupt conventional business models. Open source software comes very close to being a disruptive business model. Open source continues to creep into many varied software domains, well beyond operating systems, databases, and development tools to include application and integrations servers and SOA-specific technologies.
• SOA will push an “enterprise” agenda. As SOA deployments expand, vendors of SOA solutions and infrastructure will need to address the unpredictable challenges that will be encountered as SOA moves applications out of individually controlled sandboxes and into the wider world of networked technology.
• Customer demand for more ready-to-use application software will drive software vendors to offer even more specific vertical solutions as derivatives of their product suites. The world of enterprise applications software is approaching maturity within large enterprises and early adopter
  organizations. Organizations in these categories were the first to adopt technologies for the purposes of competitive advantage and efficiency. These early adopters accept the pain and cost that may come with achieving competitive advantage through automation. However, this is not the entire market. The enterprise applications market is now reaching out to the next group of consumers — large organizations not on the cutting edge and the ever-illusive small and medium-sized organizations. These next groups of buyers have not bought until now because they required applications that are more specific to their industry. They do not want to bear the cost of customizing the solution for their vertical requirements. They are expecting the vendors to develop the industry templates with vertical best practices. In response to this demand, IDC predicts that there will be a rise in microverticalized packaged applications. However, it will be a slow evolution because these products will be predicated on applications being rewritten to take advantage of modern open standards.
• The next wave in virtualization adoption will focus on business continuity. In 2007, IDC sees the focus of customers using virtualization software maturing to use this technology to address unplanned, as well as planned, downtime. Through smart management tools, virtual machines are able to deliver businesscritical, mission-critical, and potentially fault-tolerant levels of availability across virtual machines. Longer term, this trend will extend into utilitylike services for
  larger organizations whereby applications are encapsulated in virtual machines and provisioned across a pool of infrastructure resources based on predetermined policies.
• Consistent, companywide disaster recovery will continue to increase in priority. A critical development in 2007 will be a further heightening of corporate concern in the areas of business continuity and disaster recovery. This will be a global phenomenon affecting all regions. This expanded focus on business continuity and disaster recovery will translate into greater business success for suppliers that have a strong portfolio of products and services in disk to disk and disk to tape, heterogeneous remote replication, continuous data protection, and virtual tape.
  ! Software appliances will become a household word in 2007. The convergence of virtual machine technology and a new initiative by several tool vendors is giving birth to this new form of software packaging, which will typically be limited-function, self-contained products that are inexpensive to acquire, easy to manage and, in most cases, easily and inexpensively replaced at a future point in time. Major Linux vendors have not yet responded to the trend surrounding software appliances. However, over time, we expect leading Linux vendors and other major software suppliers to bring forward a competitive software appliance strategy. How proactive these vendors are will determine the role they will play in this new market segment.
• Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) strategies will emerge. GRC will continue to drive some direct compliance and risk management technology investments but, more important, GRC will become the filter through which other IT investments are evaluated. Organizations are beginning to understand the common denominators across multiple compliance initiatives and will look to broader information management, collaborative, and process automation technologies to embed compliance into operational activities.