The software industry is a global sector that is valued at approximately $350 billion. Within the past two decades, the software business has grown exponentially and is involved in various fields, such as networks, database management, network application and office data. Since software has impacted the globe, one executive thinks it will take down even more industries.
Speaking at the company’s first annual general meeting Friday, Matt Barrie, Freelancer.com CEO, said that he expects software will devour a growing number of industries and more jobs will head to the cloud market.
Barrie projected that in the coming decades people worldwide will connect even more than they do now, but this also means computers will be doing more of the work than humans will, which might not bode well for employment opportunities.
“More and more industries will be eaten by software, and more and more jobs will be performed with a computer and will head into the cloud,” said Barrie. “People on opposite sides of the world will increasingly work together, and through software it will be as seamless as if they were in the same room together. We believe, in time, it is inevitable that a global marketplace for services will emerge, that will be of a similar size and scale as global marketplaces for products like eBay, Amazon and Alibaba.”
This idea has been iterated by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who said that most people do not realize how many jobs will be replaced by software robots.
Freelancer.com is a multi-million-dollar company that maintains a userbase of 10.8 million, which Barrie says is increasing each quarter organically rather than through acquisitions. The primary goal Barrie has for Freelancer.com is to assist “every job, every country, every language, for anyone with a laptop anywhere in the world.”
The website currently maintains offices in North America and Europe and each office offers engineering, marketing and communications support – its staff increases every year.
In 2012, HIS iSuppli Research published a study that found the number of subscribers in the personal cloud storage market is expected to triple within the next three to five years – there are already more than 600 million users (as of 2013 data). The cloud industry is predicted to become a $1.3 billion industry by 2017.
“In an environment where mobile devices like smartphones and media tablets handle broadband data on a near-ceaseless basis, businesses are realizing the importance of cloud services in allowing consumers to manage, store and sync content across their devices,” said Jagdish Rebello, Ph.D., director for consumer and communications at IHS, in a statement.
However, a separate report (PDF) from the United States-based Cloud Security Alliance stated that cloud computing companies could very well lose business because a growing number of customers are concerned that their data is being snooped upon by governments, hackers and other entities.
To circumvent this, Cloud Security Market estimated that the cloud security market could be worth close to $9 billion by the year 2019, up from today’s $4.20 billion value. The biggest beneficiaries to this market are CA Technologies, IBM, Symantec, Symplified, Fortinet, McAfee, Sophos, Trend Micro, Zscaler and Panda Security.
