Transparent IT Key Innovation Trend in Enterprise Software

October 19, 2010

While several positive secular trends and low barriers to innovation set the enterprise software industry up for accelerated change over the near term, one of the most prevalent IT trends that both consumers and companies will experience over the next decade will be an increase in “transparent IT,” said Edward Maguire, a Senior Analyst at Credit Agricole Securities (USA).

The senior analyst identifies transparent IT as those systems that will increasingly become invisible or embedded into our daily lives.

“One [aspect of this trend] is the idea of how cloud computing creates this almost pervasive resource for data center-level computing, or scalable, extensible and dynamic computing resources available to anybody on demand, whether this be a couple of folks with a credit card looking to test a couple of applications or Web site, to major corporations,” Maguire said.

The analyst points to Salesforce.com (CRM) as a leader in the market for software as a service and platform as a service in transparent IT. He also identifies Red Hat (RHT) as the epicenter of an open source ecosystem that provides the structure for cloud computing.