I have red nice blog from Prasad Thammineni, the CEO and Co-Founder of OfficeDrop, where he raises interesting points how clouds affect on software industry in the few recent years.

As a very small add-on to Prasad’s ideas, my view is that all cloud based software industry will be clustered, in other words segmented in few strategic alliances.

Think of airlines. You have number of international and domestic airlines, which merge their capacities in strategic alliances (still being more or less free) – Star Alliance and Sky Team to name couple in the list. Put together, they can offer you way more destinations and flights and more service / value by bringing better connection flights, better price, various add-on services and the like.

I think the software industry will repeat this trajectory. The alliances will be formed by companies, which provide complementary functionality (expertise), so users would get all-in-one or any combination they desire. The apps will be closely integrated with other alliance – members, even further, I would expect some additional quality and user experience standards and requirements obligatory to alliance members (above standard APIs).

This does not, however, means that you (as user) can not have two applications which are not in the same gang, and still have integrated. Yes, it will be possible, but most likely either you will not get price advantage (comparing to what you might have, should you use applications from one strategic alliance) or there might be some quality (usability) issues. Again, this is very similar to airlines. Nobody prohibits you from buying, say tickets from two different airlines (when you have two connected flights). But most likely, if you buy these two tickets from alliance members you would get price benefits, or better connection (less waiting time), or other benefits, or all of them.

I presume there will be number of alliances in the following sectors:

1. Business applications for individual entrepreneurs and small businesses
2. Business applications (corporate applications) for medium sized and large businesses
3. Entertainment (games / music / photo / video) + social networking
4. Personal productivity (calendars / communication / document management) + social networking

Who will form these alliances? Software vendors – both giants and small, which have very complementary functionality and which would agree to internal rules (the rules, most likely, would be prescribed by the giants). My guess there will be:

1. “Platforms”
2. “Satellites”
3. possibly – Data centers

“Platforms”

The core of the alliance would be large cloud based software vendors. I think there will be giants like Salesforce and Netsuite or someone else – call them Platforms. They have enough capacities and far exceeded critical mass in users base to become a gravity centres. The giants understand they will never ever satisfy requirements of all users, and they don’t need to. Their role is being the platform. Third party applications will gradually merge them through API or even deeper integration. This way goes Salesforce.com, I believe with its Force.com platform.

Another platform could be Facebook and LinkedIn – the same reasons: giants which have tremendous users base and are to be very attractive for small software vendors. Facebook seems to be more open, whereas LinkedIn looks like having tough “face control” at its gates. Both approaches have pros and cons and have ground – think of Android and iOS as platforms for applications.

Who else? Quite likely – Google. Quite likely someone from conventional software grands: Apple? Oracle? IBM / Lotus? Microsoft? SAP? We will see.

“Satellites”

These are smaller companies, niche players, which satisfy specific unique needs of larger markets. These could be vertical solutions for niche markets as well. Think of various document management, email marketing, project management / collaboration, reporting and all other software vendors, which could be perfectly matching and complementary to the Platform.

Most Satellites will try to live in two worlds and try to get integrated with different Platforms, competing to each other. The reaction of the Platforms – they either would ignore it, or they would put strict exclusivity conditions.

“Data centres”

I am not pretty much sure about this for the moment. However, I think it is quite possible that hardware world will be involved in the future fight. You could get additional tactical and strategic benefits having data centres as partners. The software and hardware world live integrated, and could be very successful. Obvious examples of such fusion are Apple and Google (with their efforts in hardware world).

Therefore, I could imagine to see an alliance which merges (both large and small) software vendors with hardware world.

It would be interesting to guess, what alliances could appear in the future, if you agree with this view. Constant Contact, Zendesk, @Task, Xero, Salesforce, MailChimp, NetSuite and the whole world of others. What would be the alliances?