During last week’s Saleforce1 event at London’s ExCel Centre one of the company’s partners, Cloudsense, conducted a potted survey of attendees that showed that users are starting to see that the core issues with both cloud and mobile technologies are much more related to what they can provide the business, than the technology itself. This is particularly the case as cloud and mobile technologies come ever closer together.
It is undeniable that they are coming together. The survey underlined the way that mobile and cloud are on the brink of driving major innovation and revolutionising the way organisations do business. What is more difficult to predict, however, is what that concatenation might actually create. Even more important, however, is that most potential users are now starting to be on the look out for the services that might come from the technology, rather than the technology itself.
For example, the survey indicated that many businesses are experiencing periods of major upheaval as they attempt to find ways to monetise the cloud/mobile trends. The majority of the delegates polled, 67 percent, thought that the integration of cloud and mobile technologies would radically impact working processes, whole 63 percent felt it help deliver completely new ways of engaging with customers. Some 59 percent thought it would force organisations to be more inventive.
Yet most of those polled also thought they didn’t yet have the right tools or skills to keep up with the new digital world, or the right in-house technical expertise, with 56 percent saying they had either or both of these problems. Some 32 percent thought they lacked skills for ongoing development and 29 percent thought they would find it difficult to integrate cloud and on-premise platforms in their businesses today.
The survey questioned a complete selection of attendees at the event – both Salesforce and non-Salesforce customers – from businesses ranging from those with less than ten employees to larger companies with more than 1,000.
“If anyone had any doubts about the impact the digital revolution is having on companies across the board, these results send a clear message about the need for change,” said Richard Britton, CEO CloudSense. “Businesses need to re-think and transform their platforms and infrastructure to take advantage of mobile, social and the cloud while they can.”
