The Internet is a cloud. Cloud computing isn’t quite as novel a concept as is advertised. The novelty of it is perhaps more than anything in the acceptance of letting go. We have for a long time now accepted the files of “others” coming to us from the cloud, those others being early adapters, if you will: bloggers, entertainers, advertisers. We then slowly became accustomed to relinquishing of ourselves, little by little, in early chat-rooms, in online commerce, and more recently in social networks.
So here we are now, finally, on the precipice of outright abandon. Sending our documents, our contacts, our calendars, our to-do lists, plans, strategies, in all manner of detail, the very skeleton of our daily operation, to the cloud, is now not only accepted – by both individuals and enterprise – it is becoming urgent, an increasing priority. In part the trend is a matter of acceptance, but in another part a matter of economic edge. Outsourcing of data storage can be cheap. A smaller hard drive is easier to finance, and to carry.
But there is another aspect to all this, which yesterday’s announcement from Salesforce.com – one of cloud computing’s leading pioneer’s – brings to the fore. The enterprise will be relying on the cloud to make participants in its operation from its very customers. Salesforce.com is introducing a customer service platform to its enterprise clients, whereby any business can take its customer service operation itself into the cloud. Customer responses and assistance will be provided on a variety of platforms, social or otherwise, and customer participation can be open to users… so that we can, in other words, help each other.
A user-supported and even user-generated customer assistance platform, come to think of it, does not seem very different from the Wikipedia system, on a certain level. In record time, Wikipedia seems to have become an almost universally accepted resource even in our educational facilities. But when money is involved, and current technology, the challenges and level of scrutiny can run a little more deeply, and hit closer to home. So this level of cloud evolution will be fascinating to observe. As the enterprise surrenders even its customer service to the cloud – for many businesses the most closely monitored of assets, and for many customers the most valued vendor attribute – it will be interesting to monitor the patterns and observe the limits. Presumably, even clouds have those.
