If you’re leading an enterprise software company, you’re probably juggling plenty of responsibilities. It might seem wasteful to spend time following tech trends – after all, you’re intimately living with your own technology. But this is an incredibly valuable endeavor for multiple reasons:  

• Tech trends drive corporate strategy. If you build enterprise software, your clients and prospects undoubtedly see technology as a tool for business growth. They follow tech trends to understand emerging opportunities to drive efficiency, profitability, and savings through technology. They will also collect jargon along the way, and it is important to speak the language and be ready with a perspective.

• Trends can point to new markets. Technology trends basically act as a shortcut to helping you understand what customers will be looking for a few years down the road. You can use them to anticipate which products will be in demand later, and develop them now, before your less – aware competitors jump on the bandwagon. 

• Trends introduce emerging methodologies.  Consider, for example, the shift to containerized code in the past several years. That new method dramatically shortened time to market and became a new best practice for competitive software companies. Those who were fastest to adopt this approach were much better positioned to scale and grow. 

• Tech trends can influence pricing models. The advent of SaaS brought a new, exciting pricing model to the software world; the subscription model is now much more common than licensing fees. But even SaaS companies should already be thinking about the trend toward composable applications (see below). Analysts predict that business leaders will soon expect to pay for the individual software features and functionalities that they need.