End of the line

Today marks my first day of glorious unemployment, it's a beautiful sunny day here and I'm prepping for RSA by checking that Terminal 5 is working properly and printing out various tickets. It's the end of Ingrian too as everything finally hands over to SafeNet. So I'm free... and right now I'm just going to enjoy it. I woke up at 11am today having stayed up until 3am this morning, just because I could, marvelous. I've decided to take Mike's advice and have a little time off to recuperate - the last year has been tough mentally and emotionally, and I still don't have any replacement carpets.

My friend Betty, Marketing Director of Ingrian (not sure of her new title at SafeNet) put some interesting remarks in the comments of my last post, asking about current trends in the market, maybe curious as to my next step, I hesitate to say 'hers'...

Betty asks some interesting questions about the next big thing, will it be enterprise search, location based services, video or solar/green energy; virtualization, social media or SaaS? These are all great questions and I'm sure they all have a bright future, but for me they mostly represent fashions rather than futures. That is, I'm sure they will all make some people in the valley a load of cash, but I'd rather look at stuff I'm interested in and make money where possible, not look at where the money is and be interested where possible. That's a pretty soulless existence and if I wanted that, I'd be a salesman.

The closest I can get to predicting the future in any of these is to say that Software as a Service will be used increasingly in the security field, it's already happening, and I would expect to see security combining with enterprise search and social media type technologies to give us some form of data classification relatively soon. I talked about this a lot last year and I'm really interested to see how this pans out. It will be something I am specifically looking for at RSA.

To be clear, I don't think there's a market for this yet, but anyone doing research into it now will be in the right place when the market arrives. I'll blog some more on this (as I have done in the past, but I think I'll wait until I've seen some more and enjoy the sun in the meantime, for tomorrow I must wrestle with Terminal 5...