A Look Into The Enterprise Tech Crystal Ball
During a recent event, we were asked to describe 2021 in one word. While we struggled to find just one word to encompass all of the unprecedented activity this year, we threw around words like “adventure,” “unrelenting,” “unstoppable,” with even “metaverse” making it into the mix.
But as we really reflected on the close of 2021 and what is to come in 2022, we realized that while the industry is overinflated thanks to megarounds and unprecedented valuations, and a correction is due sometime in the future, the underlying behavior shifts in the enterprise driving today’s tech trends will only accelerate.
Here’s what we see in our enterprise tech crystal ball 🔮 for 2022:
Security Becomes Federated
“For too long the fear of being breached has allowed security to be siloed because of the fear of doing it wrong. And it’s easy to understand why when every day there’s a new story about why I can’t get gas in my car, meat on my table, or my Roomba to work. But by siloing security, we have been doing it wrong. Siloed security is like carbon monoxide — companies can’t see it or smell it, but it’s slowly eroding away at their ability to deliver on their shareholder and customer promises. But finally in 2022, security will become federated, where departments are empowered and enabled to integrate security decision making into their day-to-day processes. It is not a security-first mindset, but instead the ability to make educated decisions about security risk as part of their overall business risk decisions.”
- Brittany Greenfield, CEO & Founder of Wabbi*
Authorization Takes Center Stage
“There will be more high profile security incidents (similar to the recent npm registry vulnerability at GitHub) within the open-source and developer tooling ecosystem directly caused by inconsistently implemented, ad-hoc authorization rules. In preparation for this, security teams will invest more heavily in centralized authorization and permission server databases to help prevent such attacks and others that can arise from permissions inconsistency.”
- Jake Moshenko, CEO & Co-Founder of Authzed*
A New Emphasis on Partnership Ecosystems Emerges
“We will see the rise of a new C-suite champion — the Chief Ecosystem Officer. As Channel and Partnership sales become increasingly complex and companies spin larger webs of connections with their partners and partners’ partners, the winners and losers will be determined by those that recognize the value of appointing strong Ecosystem leaders to spur the growth of robust partner ecosystems, and those who don’t.”
- Swaroop Kolli, CEO & Founder of Pronto*
Data Analytics Sees the Unification It’s Always Demanded
“The data infrastructure ecosystem has made huge strides in 2021 and we’re starting to see consolidation around major technologies like the cloud data warehouse (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery), dbt, and Jupyter. What remains largely unsolved is the last mile problem in the analytics chain, i.e. bridging the gap between data production and data consumption. A new wave of data workspaces will emerge to serve as the interface that unifies data analytics across multiple disparate tools and unlocks analytics so everyone across the organization can consume data.”
- Priyanka Somrah, Senior Analyst at Work-Bench and writer of The Data Source
Data Drives How Software Is Bought and Sold in a PLG World
“The next generation of software sales, marketing, and go-to-market operations will be driven by granular, real-time customer data. For years, go-to-market teams have relied on antiquated CRMs like Safesforce to store data and generate actionable insights, but these tools don’t effectively handle high volumes of users, capture user behavior, or user-product engagement over time. The next evolution of tooling in the software go-to-market stack will enable product-led growth by making it easy to pull product usage data and provide visibility over how customers are using a product.”
- Jessica Lin, General Partner & Co-Founder of Work-Bench
*Work-Bench portfolio company
