Where Will the Cloud Take Us?

The Future of Cloud

Where Will the Cloud Take Us?

By TMCnet Special Guest
Thomas Bailey, Marketing Services Group, Interactive Intelligence
  |  January 01, 2012

This article originally appeared in the Jan. 2012 issue of Cloud Computing.

Welcome, Cloud Computing magazine issue No. 11! Our compliments to TMC (News - Alert) for taking us all into the cloud, wherever it leads…

Considering business communications once revolved around the PBX, the cloud is mind-boggling. In companies of all kinds, applications for productivity and customer care are now being optimized to address the web, social media, speech analytics, mobility and huge amounts of data. Many of these optimizations, in fact, are delivering similar functionality in creative new ways.

In technology terms, this makes the cloud all the more astounding. After a decade of concepts and early adoption, the cloud is, essentially, still in its infancy. Futuristically, its possibilities and capabilities seem endless.

So what will cloud computing look like in three years? Five years? Ten years? To this point, consumer cloud services have been instrumental in changing how companies interact with customers, introducing things such as chat and presence and social networks. Optimizations in the future will fundamentally change the way a business cares for its customers. Equipped with new hi-powered devices, the same forces of today’s consumer cloud services will severely disrupt the way value is delivered to the next generation of customers – or perhaps more accurately, how the cloud’s value will be discovered and executed by such customers. Ultimately, the power of the cloud will put consumers in total control.

In the future, cloud computing will finally and completely remove the barriers of hardware by standardizing the worldwide communications and services infrastructure. Then as companies discover the newfound freedom to generate global markets with cloud technologies, they’ll look back and be amazed.

They’ll be amazed that on-premise was ever an option. That integration issues no longer exist. And that what used to take months to deploy with systems like a PBX (News - Alert) can be deployed in minutes in the cloud.

Technology is constantly evolving, and the cloud is the future. TMC introduced Cloud Computing to keep us informed of the cloud’s every advancement, whenever advancements and the future happen. Take advantage.

Thomas Bailey is with the Marketing Services Group at Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert). For information on the cloud-based contact center and unified communications solutions from Interactive Intelligence, visit www.inin.com.





Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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