In this interview, I spoke to Tony about his thoughts on where we are and the future of Social CRM.

Tony started his career at IBM in mainframe sales, then went to watch the PC, client server revolution.

And today he is seeing a new kind of revolution:

• First is the transformation of business to a more social business where customers and employees are thought of as “partners.”  This change in strategy and its accompanying technologies results in changes in business processes introduced by the internet.
• And second is revolution is around the “cloud” or others might refer to it as SaaS.

He sees companies looking to deploy things that are going to offer them competitive advantages. And the questions they will be asking themselves are:

• “Where is the innovation going to come from?”
• “Where is it going to be built? On premise or in the “cloud?” and
• “What tools/ applications will can we use?”

He talked about his experience with the VC (venture capital) world. He does not seem them focusing on funding on-premise technologies or applications. Which sounds like the innovations will be centered around the “cloud.”

Click here to hear how Tony sees the future shaping up:

You can follow Tony on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/tnemelka

p.s. Tony’s lanyard was via http://www.zebra.com/

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To participate in more conversations on Social CRM, follow me on twitter: drnatalie and use the Twitter hash tags: #SCRM #CustomerService #VSCRM #SocialMedia

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