Social Media and Cloud Computing for the Enterprise

I was discussing various aspects of Cloud Computing in December 2009 with the head of engineering (let us call him Dave) representing one of the top consulting firms. The huge white board in his room was filled with notes written in small fonts. He most likely started adding notes years if not decades ago. I thought that my discussion seemed to be going well until I shared my enthusiasm about: 1) consumer and community driven innovations in Social Media by the likes of Facebook, eBay, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and 2) exciting public, private and virtual private cloud offerings. Dave paused for few seconds making me wonder as if I had said something offensive. He decided to keep his calm by saying that this is all another fad and none of it is relevant in the enterprise.

Dave suddenly wanted to end the discussion and proceeded to ask if I had any questions. I was about to ask him, if he will work with me in creating solutions by leveraging and combining the best of Social Media and Cloud Computing for the enterprise but I decided against it. Regrettably, I never got the opportunity to share some of my ideas using his white board. However, this experience reinforced in my mind that there is a huge opportunity to bring the value of consumer and communities driven innovations into the enterprise software and processes.

I trust Dave is a smart engineering manager who is focussed on delivering revenue producing secure and regulatory compliant solutions and services committed by him and his CEO to their stake holders. The promise of "doing more with less" using new and disruptive technologies can be  a risky business. However, avoiding them takes enterprises only into declining revenue and profitability mode.

The following two examples represent some of the possibilities in leveraging consumer driven collaboration and cloud computing solutions:

Saleforce.com Chatter Launch
Novell's Collaboration Solutions

We at Purposeful Clouds are working on developing Real-Time Collaboration blueprints to help our clients  migrate their data, applications and infrastructure without interrupting revenue producing solutions or compromising security and compliance needs. We welcome participation and contributions to the development of the blueprints as well as sharing in the corresponding successes.

Please let me know your thoughts with your comments by using the link below. Next blog will be within the next 2-3 weeks.

Regards
Chander Khanna