Talking about the social enterprise is changing the entire focus of cloud computing from just reorganizing IT to revolutionizing businesses, according to Peter Coffee, vice president and head of platform research at Salesforce.com.
Coffee recently spoke candidly with me about his predictions for what will be the major trends in enterprise technology in 2012 and how they will pan out.
Like many other companies, Coffee’s remarks pointed toward the “SoCoMo” trifecta: social, cloud, and mobile. But it’s not as simple as tossing these three categories out as examples — it’s about making sure that these three trends work together seamlessly while standing strong as their own pillars as well.
Here’s Coffee’s take on what we can expect to see more about in 2012:
On job demand: “All of the forecasts that I see indicate that gross measures of unemployment are really misleading when it comes to people with IT skills,” Coffee argued, explaining that while unemployment teeters closer to 10 percent nationwide and even more in certain states, the rate is really closer to 2 percent when it comes to potential employees with IT skills.
First, Coffee pointed out that we’ve “got a cohort of boomers reaching retirement age, and those who can afford to very well may be deciding to do something else.” Secondly, there are younger generations coming in with different but also valuable skill sets, such as knowledge of HTML5. Coffee said that this offers the opportunity for companies that recognize the “tremendous competitive value…in using these things effective and getting these things out into the marketplace.”
One of those things would be apps, as Coffee remarked that it’s interesting to see how quickly native apps for the iPad have already been turned over replaced by HTML5. Citing The Financial Times app as an example, Coffee said that the experience was great on the iPad already, but there was obviously a value to the FT to follow this route and that there is “no sense that they’ve compromised anything” with the strategy shift.
Coffee concluded on this front that the the only real way for any business to differentiate itself from competitors is by superior use of social technology, web applications and supply integration — all of which depend on a strategic use of IT.
“That means that the people in the position to deliver those differentiations are going to be very much in demand,” he added.
