Despite its relative immaturity, the software industry is currently reinventing itself. Wave goodbye to the days when a company was dependent on the software installed on a PC desktop and say hello to the new word processing, spreadsheets and email programs readily available to download directly from any number of suppliers including Google, Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services. Thanks to the proliferation of broadband connections in homes and offices, customers, both consumer and business, are no longer dependent on packaged software programs which need to be installed on a computer. Instead, they can use their web browsers to tap into software supplied over the internet from central data-processing plants. Add into the mix the increasing adoption of open source and there is disruption taking place in the business applications and operating systems fields.

The next year or so will also see a scuffle amongst key players, such as Microsoft and Cisco et al as the race to provide a truly unified communications system finally kicks off for real. As the industry transforms itself from being a hardware-based proprietary technology business to a more software-based ecosystem, Cisco's advantage is that it can optimise something for the network, while whatever Microsoft develops is going to be optimised for the desktop. Regardless of which company emerges as dominant over the next 18 months, the opportunity in unified communications is large enough that both are likely to benefit. To put this in context, unified communications will account for about $4.8bn of the $40bn spent on voice, email, instant messaging and conferencing systems in 2008. This is expected to jump to $17.5bn by 2011.