The cloud’s penetration of the world of business is considerably less than its penetration of our daily lives. As consumers we get most of our news, information and increasingly entertainment through cloud services. In fact, the consumer industry has become the major driver of IT innovation. Many years ago, IT innovation was largely driven by defence spending, later by space exploration and then, for many years, the best place to see new innovative products in action, such as colour laptops, projectors and colour printers, was inside the offices of large enterprises.

云技术在商界的普及程度已远远及不上在日常生活中的。作为消费者，我们大多通过云服务来获取新闻资讯以及参与更多的娱乐活动。事实上，消费行业已经成为 IT 创新的主要推手。多年以前，IT 创新主要靠国防支出推动，后来靠太空探索，再之后，大型企业的办公室俨然成了前沿创新产品的畅销对象，譬如彩色便携式计算机、投影仪和彩色打印机等等。

How different things are now. The largest screens with the highest resolutions, the fastest network connections, “premium” tablets and the best connected mobiles are probably the ones you use at home. Even in large data centres, innovation is now largely driven by consumer-oriented organisations, such as Facebook, with its open computer server design initiative or Google with its MapReduce approach to making sense of very large sets of information.

Many enterprises are still getting used to the idea that they are no longer in the driving seat. Where in the past they typically expected vendors to come running to deliver exactly what they asked for, they now need to figure out how standard offerings based on consumer-facing innovations can be used inside their business.

世界已经大变样。现如今，你在家中用的估计是分辨率最高、屏幕最大、网速最快的“高级”平板电脑和信道最好的手机。即便是在大型数据中心，创新的主要推动力量现在也已经变成以消费者为导向的组织，比如 Facebook，它有着开放式计算机服务器设计创新，还有 Google 推出的 MapReduce，它让浩瀚的信息变得井然有序。事实上，许多企业依然接受不了自己已经不再是世界主宰这个现实。在过去，他们总想着供应商会兴冲冲地按照他们的意愿交付商品或服务，而现在面向消费者的创新提供标准服务才是王道，现在如何才能将其用于自己的业务之中是他们需要解决的问题。

The cloud is not the only consumer-driven innovation businesses need to make sense of. It is joined by a nexus of new digital forces, including the social, mobile and information, or big data, forces. These offer truly new capabilities when combined.

For example, businesses can now connect more directly with their customers using social and mobile technology. This provides huge amounts of customer information that can be analysed to enable businesses to communicate in a more relevant and useful way – a change facilitated by the use of software and IT infrastructure in the cloud.

然而，对于由消费者推动的创新，企业需要理解的并非只有云一个。这当中还牵涉到新型数字力量，包括社交、移动和信息，或者说大数据。这些方面结合起来，就产生了真正的新能力。比如，各大企业现在可以使用社交和移动技术更加直接地与消费者联系，此举能获取大量的客户信息，而企业分析过这些信息之后，沟通起来就会更加贴合实际并更具实用效果 — 这就是在云中使用软件与 IT 基础设施带来的便利。

From: The Gartner

Translated by Zoe, CCJK Technologies Co.,Ltd.