"Social networking and consumer Web applications and their foray into the enterprises is what one should look out for in the near future," says Ranga Jayaraman. As the CIO of Nvidia, a leader in visual computing technologies, he is quick to observe the technology trends that will drive the industry in upcoming years. The industry has been developing at a fast pace and technologies like cloud computing and enterprise versions of consumer Web applications are what will drive collaboration within enterprises tomorrow.

Exemplifying his thoughts, Jayaraman talks about the scope of a popular consumer application like YouTube. In a consumer’s everyday life, YouTube is one of the most common platforms to share experiences and perspectives with each other as a video log. But at an enterprise level, it holds much more potential. A lot of time and effort can be saved in the training of resources via YouTube like capabilities. A technology expert or a trainer can effectively create a video podcast and post it with careful packaging and tagging of the content on an internal video sharing site, where it is available and searchable by others in the company. The users can watch it, add comments about what they saw and learnt and what they did not, what needs elaboration and recommend it to other friends. "This will provide a means to augment organizational learning capture and propagation mechanisms such as documents and wikis," he says.

Similarly, cloud computing, even in its initial stages, is a very promising technology that could transform the way IT organizations function today. The idea that one does not require everything within the four walls of the company to provide effective service and support to customers is very attractive. And, companies like Salesforce.com have proven this with their sales, customer relationship, and partner relationship management tool suite.

"Salesforce.com is an excellent example of major enterprise applications in the cloud. Force.com, on which the Salesforce.com applications are built is a very good example of a powerful application development environment as a cloud offering," explains Jayaraman.

But where do these fit into the larger scheme of everyday operations? Jayaraman is quick to answer. If one looks at the scope of what most IT organizations spend their energy on, a very large fraction of their day would be consumed in routine tasks like server upkeep, networks, storage, training, and addressing problems of resources. Adoption of these new technologies will allow IT organizations to free themselves to develop new capabilities of great business value.