Trend Number One: Content Consumption Continues

As Gartner recently revealed in “Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2011 and Beyond“, The Apple iPad is the first of what promises to be a huge wave of media tablets focused largely on content consumption, and to some extent communications, rather than content creation, with fewer features and less processing power than traditional PCs. Some of the companies that manufacture parts for Apple’s iPad are anticipating the company may ship 65 million of the tablet devices in 2011, according to an article in DigiTimes unearthed by Caroline McCarthy. Marketers must continue to focus on creating compelling experiences for these consumption devices. You can see an example we created at OpenText by downloading the “Cloud App” for the iPad.

Trend Number Two: Proliferation of Heterogeneous Mobile Devices

Gartner also predicted that by 2014, 90 percent of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices. The trend toward supporting corporate applications on employee-owned notebooks and smartphones is already under way in many organizations and will become commonplace within four years. The main driver for adoption of mobile devices will be employees — i.e., individuals who prefer to use private consumer smartphones or notebooks for business, rather than using old-style limited enterprise devices. That means proliferation of heterogeneous mobile devices in the hands of not only consumers, but corporate audiences as well. We must accept the challenge of “write once, deploy many” capabilities or we will drown in rewriting apps.

My colleague Eugene Roman, Chief Technology Officer at OpenText, recently took on this challenge on behalf of our customers…“This advanced technology allows our customers to rapidly deliver highly functional apps on all types of devices economically, giving them an enormous edge over their competitors both in efficiency and time to market.”