Here are my top five:
- The financial meltdown – what started as a panic at the end of 2008 ran well into 2009 with companies laying off staff and seeing some of their worst quarters in history during the first six months of the year. While the banking system has become more stable, credit is still at a trickle.
- Mergers to add services – Dell, HP, Xerox and other companies added or looked to add services arms to round out their offerings and compete with other global players doing the same thing.
- Emergence of cloud computing – potential paradigm shifts don’t come along that often so when we started to talk about ubiquitous computing power in the same context as utilities like electricity and gas we might just have something.
- Managed services comes of age– I have to say it’s amazing the difference a year can make. Back in the last quarter of 2008 I was attending events where the question was “what’s this whole managed services thing?” Fast forward to the December 2009 and the number of companies legitimately providing true managed services has more than doubled. We can’t oversell the revolution MSPs are helping take shape in hundreds of thousands of SMBs across the U.S.
- The Channel was a champion – when the enterprise market went in the tank earlier in the year it was channel sales that kept a lot of bottom lines from looking far worse. Let’s hope everyone remembers that in 2009.
But that’s just me. What events, shifts or trends you think had the significant impact?
