Vendors experiment on consumers and small SMBs. These customers can buy new technologies at low price points and take very little risk. It is no accident that CRM, hosted email, mirrorless cameras, cloud-based anti-virus, disk imaging, GUI-based operating systems, cloud storage etc. all started at the consumer level and worked their way up. When boxed retail was still in vogue, we used to walk the software racks at Circuit City and CompUSA to see what was trending among retail buyers. A lot of products made their way into the homes of IT professionals, proved themselves out over weekends, and then gained the management tools, scalability and integrations required for life in the enterprise.
At RSA this year, we saw the aftershocks of Dropbox’s explosive growth, as collaboration and secure cloud storage reach the enterprise. We also saw an entire class of unsecure devices (as part of the BYOD movement) finally getting the benefit of centrally administered security tools. There is definitely a lag; there isn’t much at RSA that is new groundbreaking, but what we ARE seeing are the breakthrough middle-market tools of two years ago, packaged and hardened for the enterprise.
If we follow this thread, we start to wonder about how the big tech trends of today will land in the enterprise in 2016. I predict that enterprise versions Snapchat, WhatsAPP and even Instagram will have their day. Yammer was only a glimmer of what is possible in the enterprise in terms of real-time communications and collaboration. Stay tuned.