John Rymer, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research

Software is in a “new Golden Age” that’s “cloud based [and] cloud fueled,” said John Rymer, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. His colleague, Dave Bartoletti, Principal Analyst at Forrester, added that current trends in IT are “coming from the customer.” Rymer agreed, adding that now that companies interact with customers through software, they’re pressed to create and deploy software at a more rapid pace than ever before in order to remain competitive.

When it comes to landing enterprise customers, cloud software providers face a particularly high barrier to entry. Rymer suggested that this is because enterprises tend to have a lot of “oddball requirements.” Bartoletti explained, “Successful cloud providers have a small set of standardized services,” whereas traditional enterprise IT builds whatever “special snowflake” application the enterprise needs. As enterprises progress, Rymer continued, they “are dropping the special snowflake attitude” in favor of agility and speed.

Even so, since customer-facing software with “squishy requirements” drives the adoption of new services, a lot of companies are hesitant to get locked into software that might not work.That’s part of why open source has been so popular, added Bartoletti: It’s easy to try without making a big commitment.

In a new age of cloud software business strategy, it’s the land of freemium models that have really gained popularity. The goal is the same, said Rymer — “to get people committed to your platform –” but it’s “the delivery model that’s different.” Gone are the days of making clients pay for licenses and locking them in because its too costly to switch. Now, software companies need to provide service in order to compete.

Google, said Rymer, “has really established a great position in consumer-oriented apps.” The announcements made at the Cloud Platform Live conference are “all good stuff,” he said because they give consumers “more flexibility, performance, and ability for compliance and hybrid.”

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