Last week I had a look at the past ten years of SilverStripe Ltd, which was all very well and good, and everyone got to have a laugh at the founders' haircuts in 2003. But make no mistake about it - SilverStripe is a company that’s going to be around in the future as well, so I had a chat with our CEO Brian Calhoun about where we're going. Obviously "the future of SilverStripe" is a great big huge topic, so for the sake of keeping this blog post manageable, he focused on trends in the web space.
In no particular order, these are some of the trends that Brian thinks will have an impact on SilverStripe's future directions.
Getting well away from your desk
"Obviously, there's huge growth in the mobile web area, but tablets are going to be insanely prominent as well," says Brian, "the retina display on the new iPhone is much higher than that of the standard screen, which means much more can be done with images. It's exciting to have these new devices to think about, but it's introducing complexity that has to be dealt with. We think about new versions of our open source, we try to think about new resolutions, and new ways that people will want to display their sites on different devices, not to mention all the different technical challenges and opportunities, and having to make sure it's all compatible between different browsers!"
Already the SilverStripe CMS marks up code semantically so websites built with it can be displayed on mobile phones. As a company SilverStripe has also built mobile versions of projects we've worked on, such as the Metlink site, but Brian imagines that as people move away from the desktop, much more geo-location will be involved.
Taking care of business wherever you are
Another trend Brian sees coming up is a move away from installing software in favour of doing more in your web browser. In the past you might have needed Microsoft Excel, but now a Google spreadsheet is enough for most people's needs. Here at SilverStripe we already use Google Apps to manage our email and some of our documents. That makes it easy for us to work from whatever computer we happen to be using.
"Doing more in a browser changes the way that we use the web. It involves an awful lot more javascript needed on your local machine to deliver a richer experience. What that means for SilverStripe is that we have to think about what javascript libraries to use, and what is the client-side Javascript architecture we need to consider? The browser is now doing a lot of heavy lifting; it's become a full-on application environment," says Brian.
Another Pleasant Interest
I first learnt the term API in error messages from Tweetdeck, but usage of Application Programming Interfaces is a growing trend fostering machine to machine communication. Often they're used when it's become more about having a web presence than a web site.
"We see this in our client work where we build a website for a client and in order to do that, we have to connect to half a dozen third-party services via APIs in order to build a page," says Brian.
Brian likes APIs because of how they relate to another passion of SilverStripe - open data. "Open data - almost by definition, you're talking about machine-to-machine, and API calls, and accessing data - you as a human being looking at raw data isn't much fun, so you have to have it processed for you - like having a machine create a map with lots of points of interest on it."
SilverStripe is already doing a lot of work helping make data more understandable. "It's a big part of our future," says Brian, "We're already seeing it: we have an ODI infrastructure [like we used on the NIWA site], we're already hooking up government departments, and getting large data systems to talk to each other."
Outta site, still in mind
"Another trend that I see is deep monitoring of websites," says Brian, "websites are a hell of a lot more complex now than they were in the days of brochure-ware. No matter how much prep you do, there will still be problems, so more advanced and deeper monitoring of the quality and intergrity of a site is needed." There's more demand of it because of the complexity of the sites themselves. "That's the main reason that SilverStripe Ltd developed Dawn™ - because we wanted to be able to monitor our own sites."
Speaking of Dawn, that bring us nicely to a question I'd wanted to ask Brian after Tim and Sam and Sigurd had told me about how SilverStripe Ltd had gone from selling services to a product and back to a service over the past ten years - does he think that we'll be selling more products than services in the future, or more software as a service?
"I think there’s a problem with terminology in 2010. The lines are very blurred between software and the web," he replies, "when you talk about products and services, and SaaS. We tend not to think about these distinctions so much, we just want to give the best value to our customers."
Forget Wellywood, it's all about Silicon Welly
As you might have noticed by the plethora of articles featuring SilverStripe, the media is starting to pay attention to things that are happening with the web community in Wellington. "When traditional media starts to take notice, that indicates a groundswell of awareness and people are going to start recognising Wellington as the web hub of the Southern Hemisphere," says Brian.
Obviously SilverStripe Ltd has already done some significant offshore projects, such as the Democratic Convention site but more attention on the Wellington web community will mean more projects as well. That's great news not just for SilverStripe but for all the businesses that we work with. "Being part of that community has always been important for SilverStripe, not just as part of being good human beings, but also to help us and Wellington succeed," says Brian.
The lesson
The biggest lesson that he's learnt in his four years at SilverStripe is to seek outside advice as early as possible. "As a tech company, it's easy to get into heads-down mode and create the next best technology, and it's easy to lose track of what’s important as a business or as a provider of open source technology, so the lesson is people will provide valuable input if you just ask."
To ensure we always have the best external advice, SilverStripe appointed directors outside of our company - but that's a blog post for another time...