Dr. Andrew McAfee on Enterprise 2.0, Social Technologies and Social Business

Dr. Andrew McAfee is truly a pioneer when it comes to the thought leadership around the social transformation of an organization.  McAfee was named by the editors of the technical publishing house Ziff-Davis number 38 in their list of the “100 Most Influential People in IT.” He was also named by Baseline magazine to a separate, unranked list of the 50 most influential people in business IT that year. In 2009 he was the only non-executive in the Everything Channel’s group of the 100 most influential executives in the technology industry.

McAfee is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a fellow at the Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT.

And here’s his talk on the Social Business at the IBM’s Social Business Conference – Lotusphere in 2011. In this talk, he discusses the evolution of the organization as know it. As a thinker that is working on the future of business, this talk is a close one to me.

SugarCRM and LotusLive – a match made in heaven for small businesses

Cloud is hot this year. Recent research from IDC demonstrates that worldwide spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold by 2013, to some $44.2 billion (U.S.).

Back in my Lotus Foundations days, I always recommended my business partners to try out SugarCRM to manage their day to day sales and customer management. I loved the functionality, price (starting from FREE), and being able to scale it according to the organizations’ needs.

Today, IBM announced partnerships with Ariba and SugarCRM to help clients take advantage of social commerce and CRM in the cloud.  We also announced the widespread adoption of LotusLive with a whole range of new clients benefiting from IBM’s cloud initiatives.

You can read more about both here.

And based on a survey IBM conducted in the mid-market recently, there’s growing adoption of cloud computing among midsize firms, with two-thirds either planning or currently deploying cloud-based technologies to improve IT systems while lowering their overall costs.

Adoption of cloud computing is on the rise. Recent IDC research shows that worldwide spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching $44.2 billion by 2013. With this increased interest and adoption, businesses across the world are embracing IBM’s public cloud services for easy-to-use collaboration tools to connect with colleagues, partners and suppliers quickly.

Additionally, according to a recent IBM survey of more than 2,000 midsize companies, there’s growing adoption of cloud computing among midsize firms, with two-thirds either planning or currently deploying cloud-based technologies to improve IT systems management while lowering costs.

Check out the video below to learn more about how Lotus and SugarCRM are bringing customer relationship management to the cloud.