The modern office no longer looks like Office Space, with a staff of office drones tied to their cubicle desks, working from an office-provided desktop every day.  In a world of iPads, Blackberries, Androids, iPhones and laptops, employees are accessing information from everywhere, giving cloud-based collaboration a clear cue to make its entrance.

While some enterprises say they’re still preparing for the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) era to hit, the truth is it’s already here, whether they’re prepared or not. According to a report by Juniper Research, 150 million people use personal mobile devices for work. That number is set to more than double by 2014.

The rise of the global worker is complemented by a shift toward a services economy, said TJ Keitt, senior analyst at Forrester, a global research and advisory firm based in Cambridge, Mass. Automation that comes from new technologies, such as cloud computing, opens the doors for not only global workers but for the introduction of more creative jobs, such as consulting. And these creative jobs require more communication, collaboration and flexibility in working hours.

“Cloud collaboration is not just about being a different delivery mechanism, it’s about what you’re enabling in your workforce,” said Keitt in a Webinar last week.

A 2012 Forrester survey showed that agility — not cost-savings — was the primary reason companies gave for adopting Software as a Service (SaaS).

TechTarget’s 2012 cloud adoption survey echoed this finding, with 60% of survey respondents using public cloud because it offered increased availability.

Businesses have used collaboration tools primarily for two reasons: reduce overhead costs and improve communication among the workforce. Collaboration software means that there could be fewer in-house employees who are able to communicate without needing to travel, which cuts a company’s overhead costs. Cutting costs plus the ability to more easily dispense and share information make collaboration tools a boon to many businesses.

And companies can better capitalize on these benefits by moving collaboration to the cloud, Keitt argues.

“Cloud is a natural home for collaboration technology because of the confluence of employee mobility, globalization and innovation networks, which are changing the nature of business,” said Keitt.

Examples of cloud collaboration software making waves in enterprise IT include Google Apps for Business, GoToMeeting by Citrix Systems Inc. and IBM’s SmartCloud for Social Business.

But will enterprises’ hesitance to adopt cloud undermine the benefits of collaboration software?

Despite lingering concerns about security, compliance and vendor lock-in, TechTarget’s survey show a growing comfort with cloud services. 61% of the 1,500 IT pros surveyed reported they currently use cloud services.

This growing ease with cloud could be good news for enterprises. The rise of the global worker may mean increased access to information for employees, but it could also mean consumers are empowered by information.

In an era when a company’s mistake or a disappointing product could spread through social media like a social disease, the ability to quickly and efficiently communicate with customers could be a solid differentiator. Cloud-based collaboration software could match the changing tides in business, but cloud vendors have to work to overcome persistent qualms about cloud services if they to make major advances in the enterprise.

Caitlin White is associate site editor for SearchCloudComputing.com. Contact her at cwhite@techtarget.com.

There is always a debate over whether cloud computing is a marketing phase or a technological reality; the Citrix Synergy event held in San Francisco was no exception.

Mark Templeton, president and CEO of Citrix, wasted no time in announcing that the cloud technology built by Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. a global law firm, won the firm the Innovation Award for 2010. The company empowers employees by giving them access to the information they need whenever and wherever, confidentially and securely. Using any device — whether desktop computer, mobile phone or iPad — the firm’s employees can access internal company records immediately through their private cloud. This potentially offers up a better work/life balance to employees, along with allowing them to set up new offices quickly and grow more efficiently.

“Virtualization and cloud computing is our future…if you’re not doing it now you need to be,” said Andy Jurczyk, CIO of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal.

A session on the future of IT was lead by Michael Harries and Adam Jaques, both from Citrix. Harries also insisted cloud computing was the way of the future, despite some concerns from audience members working in the healthcare industry. Jaques, on the other hand, noted that he still considers cloud to be mostly a marketing term.

Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO of CloudSoft Corporation, and Bruce Tolley, VP, outbound and corporate marketing at Solarflare Communications, hosted a session about how to build an enterprise-class cloud. The pair then demoed the results of their cloud computing test center, created in July 2009, that delivers increased data speeds for internal clouds.

Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst of IDC, took the stage to talk about three big IT trends that are set to change the industry:

• Mobility, due to 1 billion mobile internet users, 220 million smart phones, 500,000 mobile phone apps and the fact that emerging markets are phone-centric IT users.
• Cloud computing, due to the desire to consolidate, virtualization and automate.
• The information avalanche, due to the 7 billion communicating devices in place, 700 million social networkers, and tons of video dominating new growth. Today there is 0.8 ZB of data out there, but in ten years, there will be 35 ZB.

Companies still focused on physical resources are going to be doomed, Gens stated. With the influx of data, organizations are going to have to move into the cloud.

Cloud security concerns remain, especially within the healthcare and government industries, but the takeaway from Citrix Synergy is that people are changing the way they think about cloud computing. The early adopter organizations, such as Sonnenschein, are pushing aside any doubts and embracing the technology. It is early days now, but soon we may not have a choice.

Donna Lyon specializes in external communications and media relations in the software and hardware industries. She has more than eight years experience in marketing, strategy development, public affairs and public relations, working with companies including Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, Informatica and BlueArc. Donna’s technology areas of focus include software, virtualization, data centers, networking and collaboration.

Donna’s passion for marketing communications is also shown through her work as a board member on the San Francisco chapter of the American Marketing Association. Donna holds an MBA from Golden Gate University along with a Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing at Bristol University.

Anyways, what the mess of ess’ and clatter of consonants means is that Citrix, as part of its big show this week is announcing their Citrix’ XenApp software is now available for rent, from AWS, to run Citrix servers on Amazon’s cloud.

C3 stands for Citrix Cloud Center, their management suite for IaaS providers.

That’s the Citrix Citrix Cloud Center Lab, for those who collect poorly thought out product names.

The brain-pain part comes from the fact that Amazon itself runs its cloud on Xen, so a customer of Citrix Citrix would, technically, be using XenApps to use Xen virtual machines to manage and deploy public cloud resources to their customers as a customer using public cloud resources running on Xen virtual machines.

Hey, that may be great and just what C3 users want and it may work just fine, but it’s a hell of a rabbit hole to send your data down, ontologically speaking. We’re not prejudiced, we’re just trying to keep up.

Also, according to the article published today by SearchEnterpriseDesktop.com News Director Alex Barrett, you’ll be able to do it all from your iPhone. I think they should call the app, “DRINK ME”, but no-one reads anymore, they’ll never get it.

This is doubtless targeted at developers who want to play with Citrix distributed computing offerings, and the odd IT shop that wants to offer Citrix AND call itself “cloud” and can’t afford its own data center.

Really, though, it’s just another way of proving that Amazon’s cloud model is still the top of heap. Oracle, IBM, now Citrix, and others are essentially opening Amazon storefronts, only it’s buzzword-friendly grid computing instead of baby clothes and lawn sprinklers. Amazon doesn’t care- they have a two and a half year leap on everyone else wanting to offer public cloud instances, the best distribution channel extant and plenty of headroom. All they have to do is make space, keep the lights on, let their little playfriends from the middleware/manageware classroom play in their pool, and rake in the dough.

I’ll scrape together some time soon and poke around, see how good a job Citrix has done making this work and post some screenshots and an update in a day or so. Just a head’s up, ladies and gentlemen: I may never been seen again.