Forrester IT Forum 2010: Cloud, Community and Customers

Analyst conferences promise to be engaging, enlightening and actionable. I’m pleased to report that Forrester’s recent IT Forum 2010 in Las Vegas met those expectations. There was a wide range of sessions for various roles including CIOs, enterprise architects, application development professionals and technology marketers. The event’s core themes appeared to be cloud-based computing, community and social computing, and using technology to become more customer-centric.

There’s no doubt that cloud-based computing, including software-as-a-service, will continue to grow in popularity. Solutions in the public cloud have relatively low start-up costs, are available on-demand and are highly scalable. The conference offered insights for developing private clouds to operate proprietary applications. This trend is inevitable but will require years for organizations to develop clouds that match the level of accessibility, security, support and performance offered by public ones. This is due to the singular focus of cloud-based vendors on these operational parameters. Although large organizations will continue to use solutions in public clouds, they will bring their own applications to private clouds.

An interesting development in cloud-computing is the concept of community clouds organized by industry. Regional “community clouds” will undoubtedly gain momentum due to efficiencies in common solutions, services and architectures. This is a nice segue to the second core theme of social computing and community. Forrester analysts TJ Keitt and Peter Burris posited an interesting concept that technology enables a community to evolve. Many eras ago, the enabling “technology” was the ability to communicate along with tools which allowed the small community of hunters to work together to successfully obtain dinner! Today, Facebook is the technology which brings together more than 400 million parties.

Companies and vendors should incorporate the concept of community in their solutions — either by building and maintaining it themselves or by incorporating community as a solution feature. By incorporating community as a feature, a solution can empower its users to learn from each other and to conduct discussions to advance both their own causes as well as that of the entire community. Large communities have the most potential for innovation which dictates the need for effective collaboration tools that work across company borders. It’s exciting to think about how collaboration among a B2B community can build brand, reputation, and ultimately enable the community of customers, partners and employees to feel more integrated to each other and to one’s solutions.

And finally, customer-centricity is still the focus for IT. Your organization should embrace a strategic shift from thinking about features to enabling more seamless integration with your extended community.

In summary, invest to advance your customer’s own initiatives and learn from your customers while enabling them to learn from each other, all facilitated by low cost on-demand solutions. Consider using this mindset to validate that your own initiatives are aligned with some of the key themes facing B2B enterprises today. It’s reassuring that IntraLinks and its SaaS-based collaboration solutions endorse this approach.