Karen,

Nicely articulated. The only piece missing for me is a discussion about data. Enterprises are increasingly becoming smarter about managing data while technology companies would like to have the data for themselves to process. Cloud strategies are continuing to evolve and increasingly impacting technology decisions. There will be an increasing emphasis on moving technology implementations “on prem” proving a threat to SaaS based implementations. Technology providers need to put increased focus on their offerings and will be challenged to move away from a service to more of a product model. This will impact their revenue projections as well as their business model. There are two aspects to data that cannot be ignored. Organizations want to protect their data and don’t want it to be publicly shared. This might be a generational issue here and possibly as the Gen Y’rs and Z’rs take over the reigns in the C- Suite this might get relaxed. Secondly the cost of data is not to be ignored. All large cloud storage companies pretty much allow companies to store data for free. But downloading the data and transitioning to a technology providers cloud costs money. No CIO will want to sign up for recurring costs related to this for eternity. With almost every technology project requiring large amounts of data, this consideration alone could impact what happens with the project.