New technologies provide the greatest set of market leading opportunities for a new generation of businesses in the Muslim world.
Amongst these technologies, delivery of software-as-a-service (SaaS) provides the biggest and most accessible platform for technology business innovation. Saas is a model of software delivery via the web where the software company provides maintenance, daily technical operation, and support for the software provided to their client from central locations rather than at each customer's site. This reduces the millions companies spend on maintenance and support.
Salesforce.com is the dominant figure in the SaaS industry providing CRM related services on a fee-per-usage basis to clients both big and small. Other sectors that are coming on board include web conferencing/collaboration such as WebEx, and HR-related software such as Employease. On the consumer end many utilty applications such as Wordprocessors, spreadsheets etc. are moving towards becoming web-based software on-demand.
Another technology trend is the open source software revolution (software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees.) This revolution is making enterprise technology accessible to many who couldn’t afford otherwise. Examples of open-source software products are Linux (operating system based on Unix), Eclipse (software framework for "rich-client applications" ), Apache (HTTP web server), Tomcat web server (web container), Moodle (course management system), OpenOffice.org (office suite)
Also, wireless technologies and services are in a continued growth pattern driven by consumer demand for mobility and freedom. Mobile media players, cell phones and PDA's with the combined use of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, ultra wideband, infrared and RF transmission frequencies will continue to gain further prominence.
Finally the most promising, yet research intensive technological developments of the future are modern biomedical technologies and nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology, which is the manipulation of materials at the molecular level to achieve something useful is seen as having huge potential in areas as diverse as healthcare, IT and energy storage. Example applications include, miniaturised data storage systems with capacities comparable to whole libraries' stocks, medical diagnostic tools and sensors, solar energy collection (photovoltaics), flexible display technologies and e-paper, composites containing nanotubes, and new forms of computer memory,
Similarly, modern day Biotechnology is driving innovative solutions in healthcare, forensic medicine and environment friendly manufacturing by capitalizing on the attributes of cells and putting biological molecules, such as DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid, the genetic material of almost all living things), and proteins, to work for us.
These key 5 ground breaking technologies present opportunities for businesses to participate in leading the world or use their developments in delivering value to their customer segments.
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