We are hearing a lot about clouds in the press. These clouds are acting as defacto infrastructure for companies. Clouds can be used for internal applications or to reach external stakeholders like customers or domain experts. Cloud providers like Amazon, Salesforce.com and Google provide applications that can be used for internal efficiency. Amazon provides storage space for customers, Google provides them with productivity applications like docs, calendar and Gmail. To reach customers, applications like Facebook and LinkedIn can be very helpful. Similarly, companies can use Innocentive to reach domain experts and solve complex problems.

While there are a few success stories and case studies on how Innocentive, Google and Amazon have been used successfully, I was quite surprised to readthat Facebook and other social networking applications haven't been that successful for P&G. I am teaching a class this summer that will focus on the use of these platforms within corporations and am looking for success stories and lessons.