Disruptive technologies such as hand-held devices, cloud computing and social media are rattling the foundations upon which traditional businesses are built. Enterprise customers have grown smarter at ensuring the latest technological trends work in their favor. Everyone is trying to zero in on their core competencies by employing commodity services to run their business.

Likewise, enterprise application vendors need to zero in on their core competencies and enhance more value to the businesses of their clientele by leveraging standards-based commodity services, such as IaaS and PaaS, provided by leaders in those segments (e.g. Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform etc.).

What else enterprises need to do is learn to adopt new and emerging technologies such as cloud, utility and social computing to build on them to penetrate new market avenues.

New small and medium-sized entrants into the market are constantly challenging enterprises given their ability to rapidly turnaround and address the requirements of the customers in a cost-effective manner. Additionally, these new advancements also affect how enterprises create, deploy, and manage solutions and applications. If you take the example of Force.com, for instance, you find that it’s a common war zone for enterprise application vendors to furnish SME markets with their applications, with the new entrants mostly having an edge.

Data has always been important to business. While it wasn't long ago that businesses kept minimal information on people who bought their products, nowadays companies keep vast amounts of data. In the late 20th century, marketers began to take demographics seriously. It was hard to keep track of so much information without the help of computers.

Only large companies in the '60s and '70s could afford the research necessary to deliver real marketing insight. The marketers of yesteryear relied upon focus groups and expensive experiments to gauge consumer behavior in a controlled environment. Today even the smallest of companies can have access to a rich array of real-world data about their consumers' behavior and their consumers. The amount of data that is stored today dwarfs the data of only a few years ago by several orders of magnitude.

So what kind of information are businesses storing for marketing purposes? Some examples include:

- Demographic information — age, gender, ethnicity, education, occupation and various other individual characteristics.

There has been and continues to be a plethora of observational studies by different researchers in the publishing industry focused on how e-books have affected hard-copy book sales. Evidence from these studies has indicated that there is a significant and monumental shift away from hard-copy books to e-books.[1]These findings precipitate fears that hard-copy books might become more expensive in the near future as they begin to be less available.  This scenario could escalate to the point where only collectors of hard-copy books are willing to pay the high price for ownership.

The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, made a statement in July 2010 that sales of digital books had significantly outstripped U.S. sales of hard-copy. He claimed that Amazon had sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hard-back books over the past three months. The pace of this change was unprecedented;  Amazon said that in the four weeks of June 2010, the rate of sales had reached 180 e-books for every 100 hard-backs sold. Bezos said sales of the Kindle and e-books had reached a "tipping point", with five authors including Steig Larsson, the writer of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series, each selling more than 500,000 digital books.[2] Earlier in July 2010, Hachette said that James Patterson had sold 1.1m e-books to date.

According to a report made by Publishers Weekly, for the first quarter of 2011, e-book sales were up 159.8%; netting sales of $233.1 million. Although adult hard-cover and mass market paperback hard-copies had continued to sell, posting gains in March, all the print segments had declined for the first quarter with the nine mass market houses that report sales. Their findings revealed a 23.4% sales decline, and that children’s paper-back publishers had also declined by 24.1%.[3] E-book sales easily out-distanced mass market paperback sales in the first quarter of 2011 with mass market sales of hard-copy books falling to $123.3 million compared to e-books’ $233.1 million in sales.

According to .net sales report by the March Association of American Publishers (AAP) which collected data and statistics from 1,189 publishers, the adult e-Book sales were $282.3 million in comparison to adult hard-cover book sales which counted $229.6 million during the first quarter of 2012. During the same period in 2011, eBooks revenues were $220.4 million.[4] These reports indicate a disconcerting diminishing demand for hard-copy books.

No matter what type of business you’re in, boosting your bottom line is always in the back of your mind. In a rough economy, it can be tempting to focus too much on pulling in more money and not enough on containing it from within.

That’s right, containing it. You have the potential to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars every year right under your nose from something as simple as lack of or ineffective computer training.

How much do the employees you have working for you right now really understand about technology? How good is your IT tech department? Technology changes faster than a blink of an eye and oftentimes, businesses struggle to keep their top employees trained.

With millions of dollars being lost to Internet espionage, file corruption and other computer crimes, staying on top of changes is essential. Recently, online learning centers have been emerging as the go-to method for quick and inexpensive learning. Unfortunately, this type of computer learning isn’t always the best solution.