Home topics small-business-resources growing Growing Hot Tips Tech Growing Ten business technology trends for 2012 Maree Sorbello November 17, 2011 Verizon has put together a list of 10 technology trends for 2012, predicting the connections between people, machines and their environments will shape the way small businesses work. Verizon Business area vice president John Karabin spoke to Dynamic Business , saying: “things like collaboration and social media are all kind of coming together to shift the way that we do business, and SMEs that take advantage of that will of course do much better than the ones that decide not to get on the bandwagon.” The company expects enterprise technology to help business leaders re-engineer the workplace to improve customer service and create opportunities for improvement. Verizon’s 10 technology trends likely to affect businesses and their employees in 2012 are: 1. The High-IQ network effect revolves around all devices and endpoints becoming smarter, benefitting businesses through increasingly reliable connections and opportunities to solve challenges in new innovative ways. 2. The Enterprise Cloud will allow business to shift workloads between a corporate data centre and their cloud of choice , whether it be public, private or a hybrid model. Karabin says cloud is a big ticket item, allowing business to simply store and use data as they need it. “Cloud is allowing providers such as ourselves to own and run the hardware and the software on behalf of other people so that they don’t have to go to the cost of