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Digital Transformation

Does $1B make mobile mainstream?

The New York Times had a nice article about the purchase of Instagram by Facebook for $1Billion.  Whether you think its worth it or not, it begs a bigger question – especially for the larger enterprise community.  Does that make mobile mainstream?  This purchase didn’t kickstart the mobile revolution but for a lot of IT and business leaders, this might have validated their working assumptions and budget bets for 2012/13.  The enterprise IT conversation will revolve around a few items which are clearly being validated by the marketplace:

  • Mobile is no longer a long-pole bet – it is usually the impetus for portal/social upgrades
  • Social business is in three very prominent places in the enterprise
    • Kick starting internal social networks
    • migrating mature communities to the external stakeholders
    • the bleed of external social and internal social – you need a strategy
  • Gamification or other adoption drivers are key to the short AND long term success of social communities
  • Social portals are now the norm
  • Location and presence will play a larger role with the dispersion of the modern workforce – enter true unified communications

You will see some or all of the above possibly start and live on mobile-only platforms like Instagram and Foursquare.  This is going to be a bigger bone to toss because companies are just starting to wrap their heads around the BYOD (bring your own device) concept or supporting multiple forms of employee/stakeholder mobile expectations.  Another move is the moving of the above onto private hosting environments.  This will make the big boys (IBM, MS, Oracle, etc) have to rethink their licensing models to deal with bursts and valleys of CPU’s.  All in all its the natural movement of IT.  Albeit, the movement is much, much faster than most people have come to get accustomed to in the past 4-6 years.  We are in a tech burst (sans bubble) and everyone is just trying to stay afloat.  This is just the beginning.

 

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Jonathan Distad

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