Listen to everyone in your company and figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines—the ones who actually talk to the customer—are the only ones who really know what's going on out there. You'd better find out what they know.
The database is the most important piece of software in the enterprise, and the most important piece of software in the enterprise is the database. The database is the foundation of all applications. The database is the heart of the application, and the application is the heart of the business. The key to performance is to keep the hot data in memory. The future of databases is in the cloud. Data is the new oil. It's valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value. The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.