Remember the late 1990s? Beanie Babies selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay, the Macarena was ranked the “#1 Greatest One-Hit Wonder of All Time”, and the Dot Com Bubble was still the Dot Com Boom.
At the time, Microsoft dominated consumer tech and they were just setting their sights on winning the enterprise software market, too. A friend of mine who was trying to recruit me to join the Collective at that time told me that his management believed they would soon eliminate all the enterprise technology NOISE (Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun and Everyone else).
Fast forward to today: Microsoft is still hot, and wickedly profitable, and they have certainly penetrated the enterprise with great middleware products: SharePoint, .Net, and SQL Server just to name a few.
But not only does all the NOISE still remain (well, almost all – Oracle gobbled up Sun, as well as the remaining pieces of the Netscape+Sun iPlanet partnership), but new enterprise competitors also have emerged.
CIOs know that to get their jobs done, all of these technologies must seamlessly coexist in the enterprise.
What’s my point? I always tell my customers that if you want to be successful in your enterprise technology decisions, focus more on supportable integrations and long-term technology flexibility and less on trying to guess what will be the future dominant technology; any app you build today, will need to adapt to support future generations of technology deployed tomorrow.
At Qumu, we keep this “best practice” in mind when we think of customers building apps that include video.
In VCC v6.2, we provide flexible tools to help our customers to build video-enabled business process apps that seamlessly integrate with third-party technologies in use today, but which will also adapt to new technologies deployed in the future. We have extended our frameworks and our SDK so that customers can video-enable apps regardless of whether they are behind the firewall, in the cloud, or on mobile devices, and then flexibly change pieces as needed in the future.
If you are a developer and haven’t seen our newest SDK, definitely ask to check it out. Perhaps you can build an app to address future NOISE (and Microsoft, too).