Head in the Cloud

"The public debate about cloud computing is over," Dan Burton, an executive with Salesforce.com, said at an IPI policy summit Wednesday. "Everyone agrees that the government has to go to the cloud."

However, he noted, "there is still a lot of confusion about what it looks like and what it means." Burton's top priority is trying to get government agencies to "adopt these cloud technologies."

That will be an integral part of what Burton refers to as the "social enterprise."

In layman's terms, that means having companies use software that functions in the same way Facebook does.

"Everything is going social and that’s what the next decade is about," Burton added.