Today few of us could manage for long at work without e-mails, socially they are useful but in business they are, for even the smallest businesses, essential. E-Mails revolutionized the way we work: it changed how we share information including the volume, how often and how quickly and it sped up the entire world economy in the process. Now the world economy needs speeding up again and cloud computing could be as big as e-mail and take the dissemination of data and information even further.
E-mail was more than just about communication like post was and still is, it was often about collaboration, about conversations and discussions that were impractical by post. What cloud computing does is allow people to communicate and collaborate in new ways on documents that instead of being owned by one person in a company are truly collaborative documents: this is a positive thing in the majority of cases.
Cloud computing doesn’t stop at collaboration across one site either, which has been possible to some extent with a well setup network for some time. Cloud computing allows collaboration across many sites in many states or countries and across different organizations so that customers, contractors and others can be bought in to work together in a seamless way. IBM’s Lotus offering led the way with collaborative software for local and wider networks and now Lotuslive is IBMs main cloud computing offering.
Source: IB Systems Blog