Apple is known for always trying to impress with the best quality in their products and services. They have done it again, once the new programming language called Swift was revealed. It has been in the works for the past 4 years, and while it started as a side project for Chris Lattner, an employee of Apple, it has easily gained trust with the top execs of the company, having assigned a great team to help finishing it.

Cloud is probably one of the most used term in IT industry of this decade; but what does the cloud actually mean? From its very beginnings, the “Internet” network has been represented visually, through diagrams, by a cloud, thus showing the fact that it is offered as a service, without revealing information about its technical implementation, offering only an interface for communicating with other networks.

At a time when market pressure and the need for increased competitiveness in all economic area are becoming increasingly stringent, IT industry has its own particular place and plays a very important role that can make the difference between the companies which are going to be sustainable and successful in the coming decade, by investing in innovation, research, process efficiency and those which are settling for what they are doing at the moment, thus risking to disappear from the market.

Success in business, nowadays, is considered by some entrepreneurs to be pure lottery. We are looking in admiration towards the market leaders who succeed to remain on top, towards those who have managed to reinvent themselves, but especially towards the new ones who have conquered large areas of the market in very short time. What is their secret? What is their business model? Which is the innovation behind their idea? Why have they succeeded where others have failed?

I have been working in IT, in software outsourcing, for more than 10 years and I have followed the development of this industry from inside it. The financial crisis and the focus on making costs more efficient has lead an increasing number of companies to resort to outsourcing, a trend that favoured the development of this sector. With what consequences? To begin with, it has created a protecting crystal ball around this sector which has continued to grow organically despite the financial crisis and bloomed exactly at a time when other industries were restricting their activity or were vanishing completely. Secondly, it has been accompanied by a larger employment offer, good wages and a Western-level work environment. However, increasing costs has led to the profit margin in the case of outsourcing becoming smaller than what it was 7 to 10 years ago and thus to making room for a stronger cost-based competition coming from India or China.

Forrester Research company indicates that by 2020 the global cloud computing market will reach USD 160 billion, 83% of which will consist of SaaS solutions. Regardless of the accuracy of predictions, one thing is certain – SaaS will have a major impact on the ISV companies whose revenues are based on license sales.