I note that, in its announcement above of its acquisition of Radian6, “Salesforce.com recognizes that the incredible adoption of social media has brought about a massive shift in the industry, the shift to Cloud 2. The first phase of cloud computing was about leveraging technologies that were low cost, fast and easy to use on your desktop. Cloud 2 represents the next generation of cloud computing, one that is inherently social, mobile and open.“
Although there is much PR-speak in that statement, I do recognize much of it to be true and in line with my own thinking. Just as many companies are starting to awake to Cloud 1, the world is moving on to Cloud 2 which puts social technologies at its very heart. And to be clear, we are not talking just consumers here. Indeed “the Consumerisation of IT”, that we have written about so often, will mean that this will move to the Enterprise with lightning speed – just as the iPad has been so readily adopted within the Enterprise.