What Tech Media Is Talking About
Here at LaunchSquad, it’s vital that we stay on top of all the latest trends (and the newest buzzwords) in the tech industry. My colleagues and I typically get a feel for what’s hot by constantly keeping tabs on what the media is talking about and watching the emerging (and maturing) markets our clients are involved in. I recently worked on a project that included studying what the top technology trade publications are covering and found the results really interesting.
The research process was clearly imperfect, but all things considered, I think they provide a pretty accurate look at what IT topics are being covered the most these days. To get the data, I took about 20 of the most common terms and industry categories and searched the sites of nine popular trade outlets (i.e. InformationWeek, Network World, ZDNet, CIO Magazine) to find out which ones were most popular. A couple terms appeared so few times, they didn’t make the final list (accounted for in the “other” category), but the following 12 topics are frequently discussed – some more than others – in IT media.
Hot Topics in Tech Trades
Marketing and PR folks like ourselves can come up with as many catchy terms as we’d like, but one thing that will never change is that security will always be a top-of-mind issue amongst IT professionals. Our research results show a whopping 20 percent of stories addressing the topic, more than any other. Security has always been and will continue to be important to people, in technology of course, but across virtually all facets of society – automotive, airline, finance, government – people want to feel secure, and the same goes for the IT world.
Storage is tied as the second most discussed topic with 14 percent of the total. As Internet and business needs continue to grow, companies will always need additional storage to keep up with the demand, and it will therefore continue to be a highly relevant topic in IT. One example is LaunchSquad client Ocarina, which optimizes online storage for media-rich, digital files and images, clearly an emerging problem as online data grows exponentially with increased bandwidth and Internet ubiquity.
Virtualization is admittedly a broad term, which probably accounts for it also coming in at 14 percent. But all things point to this being a very important and timely issue that is of increasing interest to CIOs and IT managers. We’ll hear more and more about this topic as the push to virtualize additional IT resources like desktops, servers and storage continues. Some believe this trend is part of a “perfect storm” brewing within IT, so it’ll be quite interesting to see how the topic progresses. Look for some exciting stuff on this issue soon from new LaunchSquad client Precise Software Solutions.
A result we found particularly interesting is that SaaS (and its sister cloud computing) generated almost five times as much coverage than enterprise software. While SaaS has been a growing slice of the enterprise software market, these numbers would suggest its popularity is driving the software market, which aligns with most projections that the future of software will be dominated by on-demand models. Good news for our SaaS clients, SuccessFactors, Daptiv, InsideView and Awareness.
As we’ve discussed previously on Exclamation, cloud computing is an increasingly used buzzword and is getting more attention in IT media. Cloud computing has technically been around for a while as it refers to anything that uses the Internet to allow people to connect to technological services. With just three percent of market share in the IT trades, we expect that number to increase as IT shops get more comfortable with the concept and its benefits.
All in all, a pretty interesting overview of what’s truly hot in the tech space. It might not be true in the tech industry that “one day you’re in and the next day you’re out,” but trends do come and go as new technologies emerge and companies continue to grow and adapt to the constantly evolving needs of their business.
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Comments (2 Responses)
Great piece, going through it I’m trying to decide which are clearly PR or marketing created buzzwords: SaaS, Cloud Computing (as you note), certainly Web 2.0, virtualization(?).
Any others? Either way, that’s a good hit rate on what at least initially was jargon.
Metz
Posted on August 17th, 2008 at 9:26 pm.
Neal, what’d you use to run the analysis? R6?