As the cloud finds new business opportunities in services and products, it’s important to watch out for trends developing in the industry, from an IT management standpoint, the executive level, and beyond. With 2011 nearing Q2, it’s a good time to reflect on initial trends, as well as areas of growing potential.

Consultation firm Deloitte Consulting released a report identifying some disruptive and emerging trends CIOs should notice for the coming year, in and outside the cloud. The trends are divided into 2 parts: (Re)Emerging Enablers, and Disruptive Deployments.  As these trends pertain to the cloud space, and many of the companies we discuss on SiliconAngle, let’s highlight the study’s main points, and relate them back to the industry.

(Re)Emerging Enablers

The first trend was “Almost Enterprise Applications”, or cloud and as-a-service are the first trend Deloitte noted. According to Deloitte some may not be confident these are sufficient for enterprise use, but countless companies including Salesforce.com, who recently unveiled Service Cloud 3, are more than capable of proving the opposite. The second trend noted was CIOs as Revolutionaries – noting that CIOs are the execs geared to align the cloud, mobile and social media with corporate agendas.

Cyber Intelligence took the third spot, and Deloitte noted companies should move from reactive to proactive. The latest example justifying this claim is the recent RSA incident – EMC’s security division’s cybersecurity breach and what it means to the private cloud’s integrity. Taking no. 4 is the End ofDeath of ERP, followed by (data) visualization – a trend gaining momentum with tools such as the enhanced Urban Mapping offering and Google’s recently opened Public Data Explorer.

Disruptive Deployments:

Applied Mobility is the 6^th trend Deloitte noted in its report, stating 2011 may be the year companies may start to harness the true power of mobile – utilizing tools including VMware View and the hundreds of business apps already available for tablets and Smartphones. The second disruptive deployment trend in Deloitte’s list was Capability Cloud followed by Real Analytics, a huge aspect of Hadoop as Bank of America’s Abhi Menta noted; and Social Computing. This trend was mentioned in context to metrics, and comes alongside the last trend highlight in Deloitte’s report – User Engagement. This is the concept every social media marketing virtually stands on, and the research firm believes companies should put it in practice on an enterprise scale.