by John Brandon

10 Technologies That Changed Business Forever

News
Jul 9, 20125 mins

The applications, devices and services that have changed the way we do business often started as small-scale alternatives to the status quo. Now we can't survive without them.

Remember when you first saw the iPhone? Glimmering like a rare jewel at the Apple store, the debut model was originally dismissed as a bit player in the enterprise, especially compared to the (ahem) BlackBerry. Now, just about every high-ranking corporate official, not to mention pre-teen, has one in his or her pocket.

What other technology, gadgets and enterprise services have changed business in such a dramatic way? For most IT leaders, there’s a good chance a CRM tool or even a seemingly minor Web technology such as OAuth made more waves over the long term. These innovations caused a sea change of their own. In fact, we’re trying to figure out how anyone ran a company without them.

1. The LAMP Stack

LAMP Stack, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP

Here’s an innovation you won’t hear about in an ad during the Summer Olympics. The LAMP Stack—Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP—is a bundle of free open source tools for Web development and deployment. Jordan Hudgens, a software engineer for MCW Services, says LAMP was groundbreaking because of its low deployment costs. That makes sense—before LAMP, companies would have to hire a disparate group of engineers, many of them using the .NET Framework, and license technology from Oracle and Microsoft.

9. Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services

It might not seem obvious, but some of the most famous companies today rely on Amazon Web Services, a cloud platform for storage and data processing. For example, without AWS there would be no Dropbox. Analyst Rob Enderle says the major benefit is that even very small companies can sign up for these enterprise services and use high-end management features that allow them to scale as they grow.

10. Google Docs

Google Docs

Google is one of the most innovative companies of the last ten years, but one of its crowning achievements for business is not even related to search. Google Docs is now one of the best ways to collaborate, share documents with co-workers and store business information in the cloud. Analyst Rob Enderle says Google Docs helped usher in the age of remote computing, since users could easily post work online and head out for the day. The sea change, it should be pointed out, depended on another major innovation—mobile computing.

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