Wisdom of clouds
Jinfo Blog

30th June 2008

By Tim Buckley Owen

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‘Customer is King’, the saying goes, although the principle tends to have been more honoured in the breach than in the observance in the past. Lately, the growth of social networking has shifted the balance more in favour of the customer, and big corporations now ignore concerted consumer pressure at their peril. But that’s only the start. Recent research suggests that the real disruption is going to come from the rise of the expert customer. ‘In 2013 customers will have supplanted in-house R&D as the primary source of innovative new ideas for their companies’, is the bold claim from the Economist Intelligence Unit in its report The Digital Company 2013: How Technology Will Empower the Customer (outline at http://digbig.com/4xcpb). According to EIU, web-based customer communities will play a much greater role than today in gathering innovative ideas for products and services, and in assisting with product support. True, there may be some way to go before this comes about, not least because web content management systems haven’t yet fully got to grips with the integration of social networking tools into their offerings. Research from content management system specialist CMS Watch suggests http://cmswatch.com/About/Press/200806WCMESS/ that, although vendors are rolling out 2.0 features, such as blogs, tag clouds and forums, some applications – wikis for instance – don’t necessarily compete effectively with standalone tools yet. But they will. And another upcoming development – cloud computing – looks set to be even more disruptive still. IT analyst Gartner defines cloud computing http://digbig.com/4xcpc as ‘a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” using internet technologies to multiple external customers’. In other words, if you’ve got a web connection, you can harness unimaginable computing power at your own desktop. Gartner sensibly points out that the ultimate measure of this technology’s success will be whether it leads to new business opportunities. But, according to a recent post from Content Blogger John Blossom, that may be sooner – and closer to home – than we think. Reflecting on the competition between Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg for space on the desktops of investment bankers and portfolio managers http://digbig.com/4xcpd Blossom points out that cloud computing – along with the financial downturn – may herald the end of big investment bank trading floors as the driver for measuring the success of financial information services. ‘More and more network-oriented “cloud computing” services are going to subsume more and more profitable parts of securities transaction support, while information suppliers find an increasingly narrow range of clientele ready to spend handsomely on major desktop integration services,’ Blossom suggests. Now, however well supported they are by evidence, it’s in the nature of predictions like these that they’re – well, cloudy – to begin with. But if they’re proved right...

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