Collabrax Blog

Marriage Between Social Media and Cloud Computing

The ability for businesses to use rich Internet application technologies, SaaS, cloud computing, business intelligence, social-media driven metadata — all leveraged, integrated, and automated business processes — is changing the nature of business. Companies now know that they can (and should) do business differently, but they don’t yet know how to pull all the services and parts together to do it.

Some organizations would benefit from utilizing outsourced consulting experts to help IT needs and social marketing to get to know each other better. The bottom line, however, is that successful businesses need to be able to merge IT and enterprise social software.   These solutions are increasingly aligned to integrate and leverage traditional IT strengths with the best of the web and social marketing.

In today’s market, businesses can’t have meaningful and scalable social business strategies without a solid and accessible IT infrastructure.  Companies need to make that essential but, to date, rare connection between the IT infrastructure and the social media marketing drivers.  The natural progression is moving business toward cloud computing solutions and integration with aggressive social media marketing tools.

“This gets us poised for what happens next: The coming half-decade is going to be a tremendously important and exciting one in the business world as organizations look to fundamentally retool for the 21st century, an era that has quite different expectations and requirements around business and how it gets done,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, an internationally recognized business strategist.

An example of the impressive marriage between technology and social media: Salesforce.com’s expansion of Salesforce Chatter, a Facebook-style social networking platform for enterprise. And now AppExchange 2, the next generation of Salesforce.com’s enterprise app storefront, will includes a “ChatterExchange” for social networking business apps.  To stay one step ahead of the competition, Google is continually expanding and improving it’s Google Apps for Businessplatform.  Google’s web-based messaging and collaboration apps require no hardware or software and need minimal administration, creating tremendous time and cost savings for businesses.  Google is also developing it’s social platform, “Google Me,” which is expected to be introduced this fall.  The service will introduce what Google calls “a social layer” into its existing product base.

The business world will one day soon no longer begin and end its days in an email in-box, but on a “wall” that defines business process through social interaction.

Tags: Chatter, CRM, Salesforce.com