Where will the growth come from?

SAP's future earnings will come from a number of areas facilitated by the cloud, says Colin Sharp

In the wake of our recent earnings announcement, I predict the following sectors will continue to see growth in 2011 and beyond.

Tablets, currently a consumer play, are quickly migrating to the enterprise. Although bankers may be unpopular of late, they've shown the way in many other technology cycles, from PCs to BlackBerrys.

A number of recent news articles and research have suggested that financial services companies are adopting iPads faster than other industries. In banking, speed of information and decision-making is critical, and bankers have seen the opportunity to harness this new wave of mobile analytics and commerce.

Where they venture, many other services industries follow. This includes telecommunications providers, the medical arena or the legal sector – they all use information as a key differentiator in their customer offerings.

This is the new world of Big Data. Organisations are already seeing business benefits from real-time insight, planning and simulation.

In the past, utilities collected millions of meter readings every year. When more homes are equipped with smart meters that transmit back to the utility every 15 minutes, they will have to quickly find a way to better manage and analyse billions of meter reads representing a phenomenal amount of data.

Retailers can now use GPS data from customers' smartphones to know when they have entered a store and where they are, enabling them to send promotions based on their browsing and buying behaviour.

The cloud makes business software affordable, and the size of the market has been tipped to continue growing in the coming years.

Companies that embrace the cloud can have access to vast computing resources, including storage, applications and data. These capabilities were previously too expensive for small and mid-sized companies to implement on premise.

Colin Sharp is UK and Ireland director of business analytics and line of business solutions at SAP