TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

10 Smarter Enterprise Technologies That Will Have Big Impact in 2011

Eric Lundquist | Date: 01-24-11 | Comments

Now that all of the 2010 year-in-review articles are behind us, it's time to look ahead. Here are the top picks for the smarter enterprise technologies that will have the biggest impact this year.

Table of Contents:

10 Smarter Enterprise Technologies That Will Have Big Impact in 2011
The smartest place to be for a company, customer or entrepreneur is at the intersection of business needs and new technologies. Here are 10 projects I've been watching that I contend will have a big business impact this year.

Starbucks: No, not its new 30-ounce drinks, but its new payment system. Using a smartphone and scanner to pay for your Starbucks' purchase is just the start of mobile payment systems in the United States.

Starbucks Card Mobile app (Source: Starbucks)

Social network-driven phone systems: Skype and Google let you choose your own number. Google lets you choose which number will ring on which phones as well as provide speech to text translations of voicemail. Enterprise IT will decide it is better to join in, rather than fight the tide. Expect organizations to start building phone systems around such phone-in-the-cloud providers.

The next stage of CRM: Maintaining and evaluating customer contacts is still a big part of corporate IT. The success of companies such as Salesforce.com was built around taking balky CRM systems and moving them out to the cloud. The next stage is to manage all customer interactions including social networks. Startups such as Nimble have the right idea.

Smartphones in pinstripes: One phone with two faces. A consumer face and an enterprise face. Lots of talk about this one right now, but no real contenders yet.

The tablet app machine: Tablets are the new in thing, but except for Apple and some Android offerings, they are still mostly invisible in the enterprise. That will change as companies reorganize their development resources to address tablet applications.

Next: More Projects That Will Impact Businesses in 2011 >>

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