Predictions for Last 3/4ths of 2009:

I started this blog in early January and have had to rename and rewrite it for the last 3/4 not for entire year. It has given me a little visibility into some 2009 trends. We will visit here some marketing trends for this year including trade shows, marketing chatter such as social media tools (but believe me, not a focus as there are literally hundreds of "experts" on Twitter telling you all about this) and some technology trends. Those who follow me on Twitter and Facebook know I have been researching desktop phones for business over the next 5 years and will follow this with a series on this topic. I have had some great input from folks not in the phone business which was my hope.

As we move along in Q2 for calendar year 2009, President Obama uses the web and social media and has appointed a CIO - what a concept - a technology-aware white house. We have seen the AIG fiasco where employment contracts thus far have won out over taxpayers dollars and a politically charged environment where laws will be changed for bailed out companies. The auto industry is the latest casualty. Wonder whose next? Wonder how it plays out?

We are watching many companies hang tough but they experience cut backs and reduced spending making it painful to proceed. Many friends and former colleagues are jobless. We have seen some industry trade shows and conferences aimed at "targeted" audiences grow through larger attendance while others not be as successful. We are experiencing a stock market that makes us not want to look at our portfolio statements most of the time. How will we emerge when the economy turns around?

But through these challenging times live silver linings - potentially lucrative ideas, new solutions, new ways to reduce costs and save money with select investments, and overall a cautious optimism that the recession will start to turn around. Some of the best companies emerged nicely during previous recessions. I believe open source software will be the foundation of the future enterprise for many reasons. Control, flexibility, personalization, and lower total cost of ownership are some of the driving factors.

Let's look at some downsides before we visit the upside trends.

Not so good late 2008/early 2009 trends:

- Layoffs
- Foreclosures
- Corruption (ie Maddoff, AIG, Citibank, and many others)
- Stock Market decline
- Unsure business, financials and cash can delay spending

Reasonably good trends:

- Social media in the mainstream in marketing, customer service, and the news
- Interest in Open Source-based business solutions rising
- Filly beats the Colts&Gelding in the Preakness triple crown race for 1st time in 85 years
- Excellent business class iPhone Applications

Promising trends for the remainder of 2009:

- Enterprises looking at saving money while leveraging newer technologies such as VoIP, Open Source VoIP, and applications
- Opportunity: dynamic market changes, consolidation, and lost jobs leads to new opportunities, new business and the beginning of new products, services, and innovative ideas

Many of these new opportunities will disrupt traditional leaders. Will it be automobiles? Fuel? Laptops? Phones? Internet? Video mail? Military? I could go on, but I will be looking for the most disruptive items as I can write about in the upcoming months.

My next blog series will be about business telephones - desktop phones, IP phones, Mobile phones, softphones and how applications are changing the way phones will be provisioned for use and how they are used over the next 5 years. All my information is personally gathered, it is not from customers of my commercial position or purchased from any analyst firms. Pure IMHO, 1st run primary Twitter and Facebook-based research and is all new material.

Hope to see you again soon! I commit to not waiting so long to publish a new blog post!