Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson dropped a one liner in his What Is Going To Happen in 2015 blog post that bears repeating:

The enterprise/saas sector will shine in 2015 with dozens of emerging important new companies taking advantage of the cloud and mobile to redefine what work and workflow looks like in the enterprise.

I completely agree.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is really gathering momentum in the enterprise. As we found in our research earlier in the year, the promise of cloud and mobile have changed the priorities of enterprise IT, and formed a new baseline for business productivity.

The emergence of chat-based contextual conversation tools — like Slack, Hipchat, and others — is one of the most significant trends in the century, and will have major repercussions in the sector.

As I said many times last year, the reasons we are seeing hesitancy — if not outright defection — from today’s social collaboration tools is because they are focused on the wrong things, or at least on the wrong scale. One way to characterize this shift is this: enterprises do business, but people do work. We will see a shift away from tools designed around ‘business’ and instead see a swing to tools that help people accomplish their work. As I wrote back in September,

It will be interesting to see how this shifts the the contours of the tools themselves, but changing the thinking about who the products are for — living, breathing people, not an amorphous enterprise —  and what needs they have is a first step in that department, too.

That shift of focus will become even more apparent this year, and will change everything. So the mantra will be — people first, mobile first, cloud first — and in that order.