The future is cloudy -- and that's a good thing

One industry that is characterized by continuous improvement is information technology. An IT innovation for business that has begun to penetrate the mainstream of business activity is enterprise cloud computing, which utilizes groups of computers in various locations that aggregate data storage as well as Internet gateways for network access from any location. The result is a level of data processing power and storage that rivals those of local or wide-area networks--accessible to work groups that are spread out across countries, continents or the entire globe.

Also, unlike company intranets that were utilized in business starting in the 1990s, enterprise cloud computing does not require significant IT infrastructure staffing for system maintenance at the local level. Now the individual worker has access to a powerful, work group-specific data storage system from anywhere. That's the idea behind enterprise networks like Topcon Positioning Systems' Magnet cloud-based enterprise solution and cloud-enabled family of software applications that was introduced to the public at Intergeo 2011 and launched in March 2012.

As the name implies, Magnet was developed to pull together the efforts of field crews, office staff--and, significantly, for the first time--managers. Now, all work groups can quickly share access to project data, check the current status of ongoing work, take advantage of inter-company chat communication, and manage the projects over vast distances. Topcon developed the system to follow its vision of providing customers with a necessary business collaboration system to streamline workflow between management, office applications and the mobile workforce.