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.

All buyers want and need to be educated. One of the best ways to do that is making it easy for them to get the information they need to make decisions. Blogs provide an excellent mechanism to do this, especially when paired with other social media tools.

One usually finds that client events are small, intimate gatherings. This is most certainly not the case if you are a client of Omniture, which at this point has solidified its position as the top web analytics firm out there.

Thanks in large part to the growth of social media (see image below), monitoring your brand reputation online is no longer a "nice to have" program but an essential part of any business operation. The benefits of proper monitoring are gained by understanding both positive and negative discussions about your company on the internet. For instance, in the social web 2.0 world, many brand mentions are time-sensitive opportunities for social engagement, whether to strengthen a positive discussion or mitigate a negative PR crisis. Ignoring or delaying an engagement opportunity can have negative impact on your brand's reputation.

*Social Media Growth: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter