Over the past year I have had the pleasure of spending some significant time with one of the world's foremost management consultants, Ram Charan. And just recently in July, Ram and I met up in Germany and I asked him about the current storm ahead, (interestingly, he actually forecasted the current tsunami over a year ago during a meeting in New York City.) Ram refers to what we are encountering as a global economic restructing driven by overwhelming demand for natural resources and now credit. He talked about Warren Buffet as the best financial mind on earth today and a recession, but an industry specific recession that would hit hard in specific industries, such as the financial industry, but leaving other industries relatively unscathed such as transportation and healthcare. I think at this point we hope that he is right, but where are the opportunities in this global restructuring?

The last great holy grail for software companies was Y2K, it drove demand for software and services through the roof and many companies benefitted. The opportunity for technology companies moving forward is again in regulatory compliance, governance and enterprise risk management. Although many companies attempted to comply with Sarbenes Oxley, quietly behind the scenes business process management vendors built loan origination systems that took loan origination time from weeks to days. This helped in accellerating the current debacle that we face, as my mortgage broker said to me once, "if you could fog a mirror you could get a mortgage today."  The opportunity of the future for small business and software vendors is again data transparency and greater understanding of performance management and predictive analytics. Platform of course is king and the pre-integrated components that come along with a platform enable a company to easily plug in analytics and other business intelligence software tools into pre-existing business processes. Thus enabling more effiecient business process management and optimization of seminal business process that are core to small business owners. The advantage to small business today is that many of the software tools that Wallmart and Amazon paid millions for during their implementations are available at a fraction of their cost. During the recent Webinar on Weathering the Economic Storm, we heard the Fruit Company's CEO, talk about the importance of platform, its scalability, and how it enables business agility through the use of a CRM module. Small business owners today have more technology solutions available to them that are very affordable and address key issues such as knowing customers better.