I’ve seen a lot of changes over the past 17+ years since I started covering the B2B IT space. Four trends stand out from those early years:
- RFID. In the early 2000s, the promise of one-cent RFID tags and “lights out warehousing” seemed right around the corner. Like all big ideas, the vision can be years ahead of the concept becoming mainstream.
- Mobility. The early BlackBerry “smartphones” were all the rage with techno geeks, but most people scoffed at the idea of holding a device the size of a wallet up to their face to talk.
- Knowledge management. Anyone recall reading about technology that promised to help companies capture “tacit knowledge” (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge)?
- The ASP business model. At the time, it was a revolutionary idea to install software in a hosted data center and enable customers to access it via a browser and pay for it as a subscription.
Fast forward to the present, and many of these technologies that once seemed so futuristic are now mainstream and being used in ways few could have predicted. In fact, the SaaS model is now the norm for many business applications, and advancements in RFID paved the way for near field communication (NFC), machine-to-machine communication and the Internet of Things (IoT). We no longer hear the term knowledge management, but today’s big data, real time business analytics and artificial intelligence trends have many of the same elements.
And then there’s mobility: It’s incredible to think about how far we’ve come since the days when a device combining a phone with email was a big deal. Not to mention the other kind of mobility, transportation, that continues pushing the autonomous envelope.
The bigger point, however, is what all these trends mean to today’s VARs (value-added resellers), systems integrators, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud service providers (CSPs) and ISVs. Every one of these technology breakthroughs — from the latest Android or Apple devices to self-healing networks, robots, IoT, machine learning and more depend on software. And, that’s where we come in — you and DevPro Journal.
DevPro Journal is here to capture the intersection of the latest technology advancements and software, whether its non-ISVs moving into the software space to differentiate themselves or pure play ISVs launching a new product to solve an IoT challenge in healthcare or a warehousing automation need or solve a challenge in another vertical market.
It’s been exciting to witness how technology has evolved over the past 17 years. And, I’m especially excited to share with the world your success stories and business insights, which will play a key role in moving technology progress forward, solving many of the difficult business challenges of our day, and inspiring future ISVs to pursue their dreams. 
