In my last post, I took a moment to look back over the past year to see what changed. After looking back, it’s time now to look forward and predict what will happen over the year to come.

What’s in store over the next 12 months? Well, I see a number of big changes brewing on a few different fronts:

• Cloud Computing/SaaS - We’ve written about this topic for the past year, and it seems to really be gaining traction over the last few months. Enterprises are embracing hosted services and software as a service (SaaS) as a way to become more responsive and to focus energies on core business. They will come to realize that entrusting some data and control to an SaaS is bliss as SaaS' economy of scale allows for a level of security and reliability beyond what a modest in-house IT team can deliver. I predict that we will see greater acceptance of this in the coming year and will see many enterprises openly embrace SaaS for core business applications.
• RIAs – Rich Internet applications have been one of the most popular topics in tech media this year. Over the next year, I predict that we will start to see a shift away from general RIAs and toward different categories of solutions such as Rich eCommerce, Rich BI, etc.... I also think that there will be big advances in the tools used to create RIAs. We’ve already seem previews of Thermo, but I suspect that this won’t be the only solution bridging the gap between developer and designer. The official launch of Silverlight 2.0 should add some much needed competition in the rich web content space. RIAs will also migrate deeper into the enterprise, with adoption expanding beyond B2C applications. RIAs will be pivotal for internal enterprise applications, as well as B2B.
• Mobile – With nearly double the growth last year in mobile browsing, I predict that we are getting close to a big change in the way users interact with their mobile devices. This change will vastly be driven by better user interfaces and enhanced usability, but also by better display and battery technologies. Context-sensitive interactions (based on location, time of day, usage pattern, ambient attributes, etc.) will be a very hot topic.

So far it’s shaping up to be an exciting next 12 months. What do you think is in store? We welcome your comments and predictions.