MOBILE applications and cloud computing are crucial future trends for business software development as mobile device users in China continue to grow, said business software giant SAP.

“In the past thirty years, the IT industry has been driven by development of large computers at the enterprise level, but this is changing now,” said Jui Shang-Ling, senior vice president of the company and managing director of SAP Labs China. “The emergence of Apple clearly revealed a trend of consumer-driven market.”

He said that personal computers would gradually lose its market share to cloud computing and mobile devices, and the company would gradually focus on designing software for mobile phones and tablets, he said.

There will be around 750 million web users in China by 2015 and 333 million will access the Internet with mobile devices in 2012, a Mckinsey report said.

Mobile applications, among other seven latest trends including cloud computing, will be a key topic in TechEd, SAP’s premier annual technology education conference to be held in Beijing in November this year. – Shanghai Daily