Forrester Research: Cloud Computing Belongs on Your Three-Year Roadmap

Following the 2010 IT trends predictions from Burton Group that I wrote about earlier, Forrester Research has some suggestions for the coming years: cloud computing belongs on our three-year roadmaps, according to a post this week in the blog, The View from Forrester Research, on ZDNet.  I suggest that we take Forrester’s advice.

From the post:

“Forrester feels that cloud computing is one of the Top 15 Technology Trends and that it warrants investment now so you can gain the experience necessary to take advantage of it in its many forms to transform your organization into a more efficient and responsive service provider to the business. Find small non-critical projects to start with so you can learn how best to apply these services to your business and combine this learning with the advice in our Tech Radar to help plot the timing for these investments.“

Finding small non-critical projects to start with sounds like a good plan. There are many ways to experiment with cloud computing, especially with software as a service (SaaS), and quickly get business value without significant risk or costly financial and technical investments.

For example:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such asTriCipher provide a single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

I think that’s enough to try for a couple months. The benefits of these on-demand solutions that are quick and easy to implement could last well beyond three years.

What are some of the above applications that you could see implementing at your organization?