Cloud Computing: The next phase of enterprise mobility – from productivity to customer engagement

Grazed from Appirio.  Author: Balakrishna Narasimhan.

This week, Gartner released three stunning pieces of data that demonstrate that enterprise IT is going through another dramatic shift (via @alexwilliams). First, Gartner reported that PC shipments were down 11% since the same quarter in 2012. We knew we were moving into the post-PC era, but the speed with which the shift is happening is surprising. Second, Gartner reported that in 2012, 39% of all CRM was delivered through SaaS and that Salesforce was the leading CRM vendor overall. Third, they projected that mobile CRM apps are set to explode from about 200 apps today to 1200 apps by 2014.

Put all that together and there are three clear implications:

• Customer information increasingly lives in the cloud, mostly within Salesforce
• Most business’ internal and external customers will access customer information on mobile devices
• People much prefer task-specific mobile apps rather than all-purpose desktop-style apps…

Salesforce as the Customer Interaction Hub
Salesforce has made mobility a key part of their CRM application over the past few years. In fact, one could even argue that Salesforce’s enthusiastic embrace of Chatter was in fact driven by the need for a feed-centric and mobile-friendly way of interacting with their applications. The release of the new Chatter mobile apps and Marc Benioff’s recent announcement that Chatter will become the primary interface for Salesforce bear out this line of thinking…

Read more from the source @ http://blog.appirio.com/2013/04/the-next-phase-of-enterprise-mobility.html