But let’s face it: That train is in the station. What’s next?

Also see: Forrester’s top 10 mobile trends for 2013

Analyst Bryan Hopkins gave us a peek into what Forrester thinks is next, and much of it builds on those four horseman of disruptive change. “We went a level deeper in our research by examining how today’s hot technolog[ies] create platforms for future disruption,” he wrote this morning in a blog post.

Here they are, in four groups:

End user computing technologies

1. Next-generation devices and UIs
   New sensors and new user interfaces. Think Leap Motion
2. Advanced collaboration and communication
   Think social inside, like Yammer or other social-inside-the-enterprise solutions
3. Systems of engagement
   Real-time data, in everyone’s hands. Think Roambi

Sensors and remote computing technologies

1. Smart products
   Thing that can sense, react, and communicate. Think operating system for places and buildings
2. In-location positioning
   GPS and in-building location sensors
3. Machine-to-machine networks
   Background intelligence on people and things. Think ReelyActive

Process data management technologies

1. Smart process applications and semantics
   Real business processes are a lot messier than your flow charts. Smart process apps know that.
2. Advanced analytics
   Smarter, more predictive data. Think Cloudera’s Impala tool for Hadoop
3. Pervasive BI
   People need business intelligence that comes every hour, not at the end of the month
4. Process and data cloud services
   Scalable, burstable, and cheap computing capability. PaaS, BaaS, etc. 

Infrastructure and application platforms

1. Big data platforms
   Infrastructure to handle big data and high speed … and use all that data you’ve been uselessly storing
2. Breakthrough storage and compute
   Yes, hardware may still be necessary, even if you’re never going to be like Google
3. Software-defined infrastructure
   Software that dynamically routes your networking and data center capabilities
4. Cloud application frameworks
   Technologies for deploying and running distributed apps in the cloud, like, perhaps, a multi-continent-spanning database
5. New identity and trust models
   New federated trust and identity models for a changing world of jobs and careers … and maybe even killing all usernames and passwords

An interesting thought for executives:

If you want a good look at the future of end user computing technologies and sensor and remote computing devices, check winning Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns in the technology and gadget categories. And for a picture of the future for the last two groups above, process data management and infrastructure and application platforms, look at Google and Facebook.

photo credit: ginnerobot via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Fred Destin is a partner at Atlas Venture.

There’s a little strategy game that both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists excel at. It’s called re-segmenting markets. It’s as old as marketing itself and it’s very useful when you’re trying to define white space for your market. So cloud has now morphed into a series of acronyms that somehow all manage to incorporate “as a service”.

Maturity in PaaS

Behind all the hard work in seducing analysts into designing ever more precise magic quadrants, there is a movement at work in which the cloud is spawning the second wave of startups. Central to this new wave are dynamically configured – or “runtime” – services like Heroku that don’t require hardware provisioning and services that combat IT “lock-in” by making data portable. Both runtime and portability services not only need to provide value, but also must hide complexity from the user.

Let’s focus on the Platform as a Service (PaaS) segment for a moment. If you think Debian is an electronica band you might not relate, yet companies like Heroku and Engine Yard have slowly been building the infrastructure and range of scripting languages that web developers have been dreaming about. Unsurprisingly, they’ve also attracted the watchful eyes of acquirers (with Salesforce buying Heroku a couple of years ago) and incumbents (with SAP, RedHat, Oracle and VMWare all entering the space with slideware and, occasionally, product).

Now we’re all waiting to see how the game plays out and, in particular, what moves the big boys – Google with App Engine and Microsoft with Azure – make.

Mobile First

For those who think the real disruption is in mobile, PaaS isn’t where the puck is going. PaaS offerings were designed and built for a web-centric world, where customers build and host a backend and a web tier on the PaaS technology stack. Mobile apps, however, live across native and HTML5 platforms that require libraries that connect to the backend. PaaS doesn’t make this easy. Developers have to figure out how to connect cross-platform PaaS in a secure manner to their backend, while ensuring that the apps work online and offline, while synching data with the backend and various other third-party services.

Enter: BaaS

So mobile brings an explosion in complexity. The services are now in dire need of smart “context awareness” (that’s a fancy way to see that you don’t do the same stuff on your mobile as you do on your big screen) and developers are dying to provide consistent experiences across devices. Right now all we hear are stories of dev teams backing away from Android simply because they cannot deal with the platform complexity. It’s a nightmare for everyone. Who wants to bet their business on a single-platform, iOS-only launch?

Enter Backend as a Service (BaaS) – a simple runtime environment that spins up all the backend connectivity developers need, allowing them to focus on the user experience, not the app’s “plumbing.” BaaS provides mobile developers with the entire backend stack, including native mobile and web libraries, which ensure the app keeps the data secure and works online and offline. As a result, developers have a consistent user experience across all devices.

Check out the infographic above (or click here for a larger BaaS infographic) to see where it fits in this increasingly complex cloud ecosystem.

Why should you care?

Back to my opening point: Who needs JASA (Just Another Stupid Acronym)? Well, you may want to pay attention as the second wave of cloud services picks up where the first one left us. IT infrastructure is a total mess, and with the emergence real-time analytics and big data it’s getting messier still. We’re looking at a second wave of companies that are runtime by nature and facilitate (rather than impede) data portability all while shielding the user from technical complexity.

The VC industry has certainly paid attention. And since everyone knows we never create anything remotely interesting without entrepreneurs, that means the smart entrepreneurs took a liking to this trend a few years ago. VCs are refreshingly dumb because experience has taught all of us that it’s no good being too smart. So we look at massive macro trends (Ten billion devices! One billion mobile apps!), hard customer requirements (speed to market, code quality and security, cost efficiency) and attractive platform opportunities.

There are in the region of 25 companies active in the BaaS space today. I backed the guys who coined the term “Backend as the Service,” Kinvey, out of TechStars. Kinvey recently raised a $5 million Series A from Avalon Ventures (the team who backed Zynga) and from my firm, Atlas Venture. Parse and StackMob are two other leaders in the BaaS field, and there are rumors that Ray Ozzie is working on a BaaS startup too.

Michael Facemire at Forrester has written a good overview of the BaaS market, which is a great place to start if you want to learn more.

Money is flowing in for a simple reason. If Salesforce is the hub for CRM and LinkedIn is the economic graph, then the company that becomes the data hub for the world of apps will be very, very valuable. We’ve got their backend, so they can have yours.

Fred Destin is a very early stage investor who loves what he does. You can follow on him on Twitter @fdestin or learn just about nothing about his firm on its website www.atlasventure.com. He invested in Kinvey.

Top image: Infographic of the BaaS ecosystem provided by Kinvey. (Click for larger version.)

FatFractal launched today as a mobile development platform-cum-backend, a cloud-based stack for your –

HEY! You in the back! Stifle that yawn, mister. These guys say they’re different.

I know, I know — they all say they’re different. It seems these days that not a week rolls by without some new, buzzword-tricked-out development platform launching, usually cloud-friendly and mobile-focused, always with promises that this platform is the best solution for efficiency and the first to (insert overblown marketing assertion here).

But FatFractal’s pitch caught our eye because its promise was different and imminently practical. Among other claims, this company promises to be the stack with the lowest price. Period.

Of course, FatFractal offers other amenities, as well: declarative security, custom code, native code support for mobile devices and tablets, an events model, no boilerplates. The founders also wanted to build an engine-based platform for dynamic scaling, a platform that would support any and all languages and infrastructures. Also, a company rep told VentureBeat via email, “They liked developing on local machines and insisted on deploying to the cloud without reconfiguration.”

Still, we’ve read similar statements from every PaaS/BaaS startup. The price was what struck us this time.

During FatFractal’s public beta, its Silver Tier services are free of charge. Can’t beat free. Once the public beta ends and/or other tiers are needed, services range up to $400 per month for unlimited domains, 25 million API calls, 30GB of storage, 25GB of outgoing bandwidth, and unlimited incoming bandwidth.

For comparison, the same figures on Parse would push you into the Enterprise tier (you’d have to work directly with Parse’s salespeople on pricing). And 25 million API calls on StackMob would run you $3,000 per month. With Kinvey, you’d hit the $400 monthly figure at around 14,000 users for your app.

Granted, the offerings and services aren’t exactly equivalent, but if FatFractal sticks around, it’ll be interesting to see how its pricing fares in the ever-expanding marketplace of mobile app development tools.

Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

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