Enterprise Mobility: iPad 2, LinkedIn IPO, Microsoft Azure Steal Tech Headlines in First Half of 2011
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It's been quite a first half of??í2011. During the past six months, the IT world has seen how one device—Apple's iPad 2—could not only redefine the mobile market but also change the way we access our applications, whether its Angry Birds or Salesforce.com's Chatter. While Apple scored a big hit with its latest tablet, the IT market also saw the re-emergence of the hot IPO. While some are skeptical—and rightly so—about whether LinkedIn can maintain the growth momentum to match its current stock price, the business social network's initial public offering showed that investors are willing to once again take a gamble on tech start-ups. Then, of course, is the cloud and what it means. Tech titans??íincluding??íGoogle, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are also pushing their particular versions of cloud computing. At the same time, IT departments are??ítrying to decide whether their companies??íshould try a public cloud, build their own or invest in a hybrid structure that combines the two. All this is happening as developers are creating new types of applications that are not only cloud-based but easily accessible from a laptop, a smartphone or a tablet. As we said, it's been quite a year so far and a perfect time for a recap.
LinkedIn Goes Public
LinkedIn? No. 1? Really? Yes, really. LinkedIn was built from the ground up as a business-to-business social network. It grew up in the shadow of Facebook, but recently proved its value in the public funding marketplace. The LinkedIn public offering will touch off lots of companies thinking that maybe they should be building B2B products and services rather than one more consumer social network.
