At SRT, we continuously examine the overall technology landscape and make decisions on where to invest more time, what should stay the same, and what should be getting less investment. The change is actually quite fluid. We are always looking at what can help our customers achieve their goals, and what technologies seem to be getting less emphasis in the future.

But, the beginning of the year seems to be the right time to make a statement for the coming year. Here goes:

We’re seeing three areas that deserve big investments this year:  Mobile, Single Page Web Applications, and the seamless integration of user experiences.

Let’s start with mobile: We’ve been building mobile applications for years, and demand continues to grow. There is obvious growth for iPhones, iPads, Android Phones, and Droid tablets. Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 tablets are adding strong competition as well. There are a number of questions relating to how much market share each of these platforms will enjoy. But there is no question that the overall market for mobile software is growing, and growing quickly.

But mobile is only half (or one third) of the story.

Our customers demand that users access applications from their main computer as well as from their mobile device.  Modern web applications, termed “Single Page Applications” behave more and more like desktop applications everyday. Facebook and Gmail are the two most popular examples. These web applications provide an almost native experience in the browser.

This gets to the final and encompassing strategy decision:  Applications we’re building now must be available to users on any device, at any time. Data must be available on the web, on mobile devices, or on the desktop/laptop. The best apps can move seamlessly from device to device.  That requires building applications that are part mobile, part web, part cloud, and always available from anywhere.

We’ve positioned ourselves to build those applications.  We’ve got strengths on mobile platforms, web platforms, cloud platforms, and most importantly, building applications that span those different environments.

In my next few posts, I’ll go into more detail on each of these three topics: why they are important, and how to learn more about each of these topics. In the meantime, what do you think? Are these where you’re investing? Do these ideas represent the kinds of applications you want to use? Leave comments.