A year ago, the hottest topic amongst enterprise IT executives was their cloud strategy. There was the expected give and take about whether “The Cloud” was a flash in the pan or whether it was really the vein of gold that prospectors claimed. It is pretty clear that the cloud won, hands down.

While the Apple iPad and other tablet computers captured the world’s attention, the “app store” silently continued to change the paradigm of software. The increased functionality of a tablet format allowed the “app” to grow in importance as the line between the OS and the web browser continued to blur.

As social networking sites perfected their “application programming interfaces,” more and more websites abandoned the task of user authentication and invited users to “log in” with Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. This trend wasn’t just about authenticating the user, but customizing the entire user experience using tools like Facebook’s “social graph.”

With social application mapping driving more and more user experience, apps will be able to do things that traditional software would find virtually impossible. For example, dynamically choosing content to be presented to a user based on the device, location, and recent history. Over time, the cloud will start helping you make better decisions and plan ahead.

In the not-too-distant future, the cloud might keep track of your location and turn the heat up at home when you start your return commute. Now, if such an example still seems like science fiction to you, I will admit that it does to me too. My point is not that some specific futuristic prediction will come true, it’s that the cloud’s biggest feature is its ability to allow apps to talk to each other in ways that no one (not even the programmers of the original apps) could have anticipated.

For the enterprise, this ubiquitous cloud connectivity will allow applications to talk to each other at a lower and lower cost. How many enterprises today have to have humans act as the APIs? All over the globe, large enterprises are having employees manually key items into a new system because some legacy system cannot effectively interface with the newer one. The cloud will eventually eliminate such arcane practices. . So, while the cloud has clearly arrived, it will take quite a while for everyone to recognize how it will create the most immediate benefit within their own enterprise.