Combination of mobility, cloud and social media has power to transform enterprise

Mobility still represents a powerful emerging technology that many businesses are just beginning to deploy within their organizations. However, it's certainly not the only emerging technology evolving in parallel. Cloud computing and social media represent two other spheres of innovation for enterprises as we enter 2010 and beyond. More importantly, the combination of three powerful emerging technologies--cloud computing, application mobility and social media--has the potential to transform the way enterprises learn, innovate, and operate.

Ubiquitous connectivity and the creation of the Anywhere network is allowing enterprises to take advantage of these three emerging technologies. But there is still much left to be done. Business leaders must understand the benefits of using cloud, mobility and social media to drive productivity, efficiency, collaboration and innovation within their organizations.

Through our one-on-one discussion with enterprises, we uncovered that there are innovative businesses taking advantage of the emerging technologies of cloud computing, social media and mobility. However, companies such as these represent the early adopters of technology and aren't necessarily representative of the state of adoption as a whole. For a glimpse at this, we turned to our 2009 Transforming Infrastructure & Transforming Applications survey of business decision makers.

First, we looked at how far along companies were at some level of adoption of the three spheres of innovation. All three categories, cloud, social media and mobility, are broad areas of technology that companies can begin to take advantage of in many ways.  So we chose three proxies for each category.

Yankee Group defines cloud computing as "scalable, virtualized information services provided on demand over the Internet with multitenant capability, service-level agreements (SLAs) and usage-based pricing." We also note that cloud services can manifest themselves in the form of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Since our previous report on the energized enterprise examined how cloud can impact business applications, we have focused on SaaS as our proxy here. According to our 2009 TI&TA Survey, 52 percent of firms have deployed some sort of SaaS solution within their organizations today.

In the case of social media, we looked at how firms were adopting social networking tools: 25 percent of companies report using social networking tools for employee collaboration and 23 percent report using social networking to connect with customers and partners.

Mobility adoption was far more widespread. As a proxy we examined the percentage of firms deploying at least wireless email on smartphone devices in their organizations--83 percent of firms reported doing so already. As an alternate view, we also examined how far along companies we adopting more advanced applications via smartphone. Mobile CRM/SFA led the charge among line-of-business applications, with 40 percent of firms saying they have deployed on some smartphones within their organization.

As we peel back the onion however, it does indeed get smaller. Forty-one percent of companies are deploying both SaaS and Mobility solutions. This shrinks further to 22 percent of enterprises deploying both social media and mobility. And only 16 percent of firms are deploying both SaaS and Social Media.  Finally, the innovative firms beginning to energize the enterprise with all three--social media, SaaS and mobility--represent only 15 percent of all companies today.

Enterprises are only scratching the surface in adopting and deploying cloud computing, application mobility and social media in powerful combination. Part of this stems from IT budget constraints that are limiting investments in emerging technology. Part of this is a result of companies' struggling with understanding the value that these technologies bring to business improvement and innovation. The next year will represent a challenge for enterprises as they seek to harness mobility, cloud computing and social media to energize their organizations. 

Eugene Signorini is a vice president of Yankee Group's Anywhere Enterprise research group with an expertise in applications and mobile solutions.

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