There are many 2012 predictions describing the major trends for the new year, and my personal favourite is this one, due to the headline quote of:

“2012 is primed to be the year of social.”

Absolutely. Although social media has been a buzz trend for quite some time, as has Cloud Computing, both share the reality that actual adoption is still in its earliest days and relatively low.

While many businesses and individuals have accounts and profiles on sites like Twitter, Linkedin et al, most have not yet deployed any social enterprise software for their own use internally.

Hence Cloud vendors like Salesforce.com are key to this wave of growth. Via their recent acquisitions they now offer a “Social Enterprise Stack” that will radically transform how enterprise IT is applied to run organizations.

Cloud Computing and social media are both individually hot topics but it’s their combination that makes them white hot. Cloud enables businesses to adopt innovative new technologies faster and cheaper, and social enterprise tools like this are exactly what they should be accessing this way. It can greatly improve staff productivity in terms of collaboration and knowledge management, activities that traditional IT has consistently failed to achieve.

I call this “Social Cloud Computing” or in the case of this white paper ‘Unified Cloud Collaboration’, to reflect how this also incorporates Unified Communications software in this mix too, to further augment the modes of collaboration.

Cloud 2.0

One of our partner vendors kloudtrack also describes this trend as ‘Cloud 2.0′.

Read in this previous blog how this could be applied in any number of scenarios, such as Municipality-as-a-Service. This includes a link to their case study example.

kloudtrack is a vendor who offers a traditional BPM (Business Process Management) tool that can then be enhanced through integrated social media features. For example as part of an e-Health patient discharge process this could include embedding links to ‘How to’ videos that explains the self-medication procedures that patient should follow.

Adding this additional dimension to traditionally ‘flat’, transactioanl BPM is known as “socializing enterprise applications” and will be the single largest enterprise IT trend over the next decade in my view, and of course will be accelerated through Cloud adoption models.

Read the original blog entry...