"We've found, in fact, that one of the most common use cases for applications like Chatter and Yammer is for executives to share insights, news, results, and other information that would normally be on a bulletin board or mass e-mail," she says. "It also enables finance to keep track of things it wouldn't necessarily know about otherwise, like activities with a particular client or project."

Most companies today are implementing social collaboration technologies that "start with a clear policy of what should and shouldn't be shared on the application, and I expect we'll see more adding social tools to the list of business communications that are considered official record," as they previously did with e-mail.

The No. 3 trend --- "SAP Reemerges" --- refers to the use of enterprise resource planning in mobile-device access and other areas. No. 4 -- "Users Choose Big Over Best of Breed" --- describes the tendency of IT buyers to no longer concentrate on vendors that "offer targeted functionality with clear net benefits," rather than "broad commodity products." Today, Nucleus argues, large-scale vendors like IBM and Oracle "improve productivity by delivering more functionality in a single application and enable organizations to do more with a single data source."

Prediction No. 5 --- "More Ways for All to Manage Big Data" --- covers the rapid developments in analytics tools, and their value to corporations. "This is one area where we'll continue to see innovation (like integration of field-programmable gate arrays), mergers and acquisitions (like IBM's Netezza grab), and new product and pricing models (like Oracle's new database appliance.)"