Cloudforce impressions

I spent this morning at day 2 of the Salesforce.com Clouforce event and took part in a roundtable over lunch to discuss SMEs and cloud computing.  I took away 4 key things from the morning:

• The meshing of internal CRM data with external social media and other web-based data is inevitable. There were some impressive demos of new Salesforce.com products during the keynote by CEO, Marc Benioff which showed that real-time CRM data across multiple devices would become the norm. (The guy operating 5 laptops and 4 mobile devices to show the live demos deserves recognition);
• How we teach information systems at my university needs to incorporate these changes.  I know that the big ERP/CRM/BI, client-server systems are not going to disappear any time soon but web-based/could-based, or whatever you want to call it, systems offer huge advantages in a number of areas.  Mobile access is one and, for CRM systems, linking out to social media services is another;
• Organisations that move quickly with these tools and integrate them into their workflows will have a competitive advantage over those that hold back.  Like most successful technologies this advantage will decline as it becomes the norm but there is certainly a window of at least several years before this happens.  2 of the SME customers taking part in the roundtable discusssion described some real advantages they had gained both to their internal communications but also their dealings with customers.
• HTML5 will kill apps - that might be a bit extreme but the mobile demo showed how effective HTML5 is at providing an app experience but with faster updates for data-rich services.