A decade is a long time.

Ten years ago, we were getting ready for eight years of George Bush.  We were seeing the first signs of the dot com bubble bursting.  Oil and gold were cheap.  And Oracle, Peoplesoft, and Siebel–among others–were all independent companies, chucking boxes of software at corporate America with a vengeance, while turning around and telling Wall Street that their businesses were wildly successful.  My how things change.

Looking back, few saw the “green shoots” of Cloud Computing, even though companies such as salesforce.com and Google were in full operation, beginning their quest to rid the world of software.  Today, the Cloud is the hottest technology topic since the early days of the “World Wide Web,” but it is instructive to note that there were those who saw it coming way back in 2000.

Bluewolf first started working with Cloud applications in late 2001, a year after our founding.  Our initial consulting business model was targeted at the heaps of on-premise software that needed deployment services, but we quickly embraced the Cloud for one simple reason:  clients loved it.  Back then, they were more than willing to sacrifice complex functionality, preferring the rapid time to value that salesforce.com implementations offered.  Funny to think back, but our initial Salesforce CRM implementation methodology was called “Rapidfire,” which back in those days actually had a nice ring to it.

As we matured, and as cloud applications became more appropriate for enterprise organizations such as ADP, Merrill Lynch, and Cisco, Bluewolf’s implementation approach gravitated away from “Rapidfire” and more towards Agile, and our consultants and customers fell in love with the Agile approach to deployment.  To this day, we stand by Agile as the most cost effective and success oriented methodology, promoting transparency and partnership instead of excessive documentation and “cover my ass” project tactics.  Agile, ten years later, is widely respected and the clear “new school” to waterfall’s “Old School.”  (The movie is great, but the methodology is archaic!)

Larry Ellison once told me that the biggest mistake leaders make is confusing the present for the future.  Along these lines, it is easy to confuse the Cloud, Agile, salesforce.com, Google, Facebook, and other present day phenomenas with the future.  It is probably easy to confuse my own company, Bluewolf, with the future.    But the truth is, there are likely “green shoots” under our feet that are clues to what will be the game changing technologies and approaches ten years from today.

Only a decade will tell.