Like all on-line bloggers and journalists, I look toward the last two weeks of December as the time to begin making "predictions" for next year. This year I want to do something a bit different. I want to solicit predictions from you.
Let me, then, kick things off with three of my own:
1. Identity acquisitions will continue: This year saw some notable identity acquisitions (recently, Securent). My bet here is actually two-fold -- 1) that the acquisition pace will *increase* as we move into Q3 and Q4 of 08; and 2) the valuations paid for acquisitions will decrease in the context of a soft overall economy. (The rumor on Securent is that Cisco paid nearly 10x revenue for the company. If that's true, then I'm betting that valuations drop into a more reasonable 5-7x range.)
2. "Securing" collaboration will be the big message of identity companies by the end of 2008: My overall thesis is that 2008 will be the year that companies like Cisco begin to make a serious push into "enterprise 2.0" technologies -- essentially, fostering some collaborative environments on steroids. Smart identity companies will get ahead of the CIOs next big worry by positioning themselves as necessary collaborative infrastructure now.
3. "User-centric" identity protocols will stop calling themselves "user-centric": This is an adoption story. "User-centric" protocols will gain some actual adoption in 2008 (yes, I'm implying that they haven't yet gotten any "real" adoption). In so doing, the "folks in the know" in that movement will *stop* prefacing everything they say with the words "user-centric," as they realize that their protocols may have been designed with that laudable goal in mind, but the terminology is just getting in the way. Instead of describing an ideal, they'll begin describing what they *do.*
Those are my first three...with more to follow over the next few weeks. Send me yours and I'll post the best ones (with attribution) in this space.
