SAP on the Cloud ? Gaming Is the Only Real Game Changer

Guest post by Chris Horak

There is a sea change under way in software, and it?s not just about games.

After seeing Jane McGonigal?s TechEd lecture in Las Vegas about the emerging influence of gaming and gamers, I wondered how this relates to enterprise software and cloud.

I firmly believe that the gaming community is becoming a real game changer for enterprise software as well as consumer software, and it is driving adoption of the cloud even faster. The hype term of ?gamification? does not begin to do justice to this trend, as it tends to focus on attributes of the software, not on the consumption attributes of the emerging gaming community.

Think about it this way:

Today, there are 500 million gamers out there playing more than one hour per day, mostly online and mostly networked with other gamers. By 2020, there will be 1.5 billion gamers online (talk about a market segment). By the age 18, many of today?s gaming kids will have spent 10,000 hours or more online: Collaborating, solving complex problems, teaming up to achieve epic wins, etc. You can expect the next generation to have a leg up on skills in real-time online collaboration!

We in the enterprise software industry can only learn from this market in terms of how to:At the same time, gamers? expectations on software, and I mean any software ? consumer or enterprise ? ?are rapidly and drastically changing (talk about instant gratification, dramatic simplification, etc.).

• fully utilize online communities from the first idea to the final realization of the product
• create platforms that are easily extended by the people
• make things intuitive and fun to keep people loyal to the product
• apply visualization to make complex things look easy
• tie together communications media and consumption models (chat, voice, video streaming, platform and component download, communities, updates, etc) into a seamless fabric focused on the gaming experience
• nurture a fan-driven ecosystem around the product and brand

I am fortunate that I have an avid gamer in my family that is teaching me a lot about this business.?This list could go on and on. There is a sea change under way in software, and it?s not just about games. It?s about an online, global community of highly intelligent, collaborative, fun-oriented people of an increasingly diverse age group that will shape the face of software more than any software maker ever has in the past.

If you are interested in what the cloud can become, talk to a gamer, and get ready to be surprised.

Chris Horak, Global Head of Solution Marketing, SAP Business ByDesign

Based in Walldorf, Chris is responsible for positioning, messaging and thought leadership, awareness and demand generation content for SAP Business ByDesign as well as overall synchronization of SAP On-Demand solution portfolio marketing.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2011 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Source: http://blogs.sap.com/cloud/2011/09/29/gaming-is-the-only-real-game-changer/

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