Enterprise collaboration news: November 2013 round-up

Now that we’re careering rapidly towards the end of the year, the internet is awash with predictions for the year ahead. We’ve had a look at three such reports that we found most interesting, and condensed them into bitesized chunks. We have also drilled down to a couple of concepts that have been at the front of our minds this month: social business and the Internet of Things.

Looking ahead to 2014

Forrester published a report this month which pointed out the top ten technology trends to watch from 2014-2016. Peter High of Metis Strategy gave a detailed run-down of the report for Forbes. Forrester’s trends touch on the expansion of concepts that have been cropping up in the second half of this year, such as APIs, BYOD and the Internet of Things (more on that later). Peter outlined that the report highlights the tightening technological link between the consumer world with the business world, and suggests that customers build their impressions on a company (thus a company builds its reputation) on the digital experience and engagement they have with that business. Consequently, organisations need to make the move towards more sophisticated applications that work seamlessly with cloud and mobile, so that infrastructure becomes an enabler of engagement as opposed to a barrier to progress. This rings true with us at HighQ, as our products are designed to make engagement, productivity and collaboration come naturally.
In this article for Gigaom Research, David Linthicum highlighted three emerging cloud computing trends for 2014. He suggests that PaaS and application migration are the most important trends for the year ahead as more businesses prepare to move to cloud-based platforms. He explains that cloud data integration and cloud management and governance will come to the fore next year too, with reference to the need to reconcile private and public cloud as enterprises begin to transfer data between them, and managing the different types of cloud within one ‘ultimate’ cloud management platform. This is particularly important when we consider the latest predictions about cloud traffic, which according to a report by Cisco Systems is set to quadruple by 2017.
Another article on Forbes by Mark Fidelman gave IBM’s opinions on the forthcoming trends in social business over the next year. Social listening was high on the list, as businesses begin to tap in to social behavioural data from customers. This data can be used for targeted marketing as well as adapting products and services to perceived needs. Similarly, social data gathered from employees could be valuable to HR through recruitment and increase employee engagement and satisfaction. Next year, the article explained, social business will be about more than collaboration; instead, knowledge sharing and social learning will be key to building a smarter enterprise, something we’ve been talking about for a while. SoMoClo will get an overhaul next year too as it merges with Big Data to become SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud).

Turning to social business

As social becomes a key part of business, it is vital to encourage everyone within a firm to engage in their enterprise social network. An interesting Twitter chat took place this month which discussed this issue, and why company leaders must make sure they participate in their ESNs too. Jason Quesada (@jqsmooth) explained that enterprise social networks ”should break the hierarchy model to give everyone in the company a voice”, and Jakkii Musgrave (@slybeer) agreed, stating that the ”great power of ESNs with execs is cutting through that hierarchy & allowing them to be human. Encourage them to embrace it.” Cara Marzilli (@CaraMarz), pointed out that ”Execs who view ESN as “just a technology” (not a business driver) have a narrow view & need more data in order to see value”, which is clearly a view that needs changing if executives want to keep up with the latest social business trends for next year.

The Internet of Things

This month we attended the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Barcelona. You can read our review of the keynote speeches on our blog. One of the topics covered in the keynote speech was the Internet of Things, which has been popping up frequently this month. If you’re not familiar with what the Internet of Things is, this post by our friend Ryan McClead (who wrote a great guest post for us this month, by the way) will fill you in excellently. The short explanation is that the Internet of Things is a concept whereby more and more devices and objects are becoming connected to the internet (rising to an estimated 30 billion by 2020). An increasing number of these objects will start communicating with one another via the internet, automating processes and ultimately changing the way we live. This post by Esmeralda Swartz of MetraTech for the Cloud Computing Journal takes the concept a step further by talking about how the Internet of Things will evolve into the Internet of Agents. By this, she refers to the services that these Things provide, arguing that there is more value in what something can do for us, than the Thing itself. An interesting concept, and we’re definitely excited to see where it takes us in the year ahead!

Source:  http://highq.com/enterprise-collaboration-news-november-2013-round/