There are times when IT can be presented in a way that makes you sit up and really take notice. Admittedly, the reality often turns out to be a lot more pedestrian when it finally arrives a year or so after the demo, but that’s something to which we have all become accustomed, to the point where it barely even registers as a disappointment.
In terms of presentation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is a master of the art – but there are others who may do a good job yet not be in the spotlight as often as Jobs. One executive who can comfortably be placed in that stratosphere is Citrix CEO Mark Templeton. In his efforts to explain what appears, at first instance, to be a rather complex subject (virtualisation), he has deployed an analogy which is simple and easy to understand: satellite TV.
Templeton’s argument, in essence, is that IT departments will eventually be able to provide users with the applications they need on demand anywhere they want and to any device in much the same way as satellite TV providers pipe down the programming you want to play on the TV you chose and bought yourself. This is a far cry from the present situation where IT departments choose the device you use – be it laptop or PC – and what goes on it.
While like many employees I like the idea of being able to choose which applications to run on my computer (and being able to choose what type of computer to run them on), I can’t help feeling there are a number of potential problems with this picture that may take some time to fix. First, the infrastructure is different. By that I mean that television has always been a broadcasting medium. IT, by contrast, has never been and still is not a broadcasting medium.
It’s no surprise then that the makers of IT infrastructure and the people who sell it to customers are unlikely to be coming at it with a broadcasting perspective. In addition, Templeton made much of “the momentum of consumerisation” which he believes will help to drive IT towards an on-demand model. But here again we have to ask ourselves just how far that process of consumerisation will actually extend in the IT infrastructure.
There is an argument that the X & Y generations will push enterprises towards a more flexible approach over how they provide IT to their workers and to what devices they run that IT on because, if employers don’t do it, the blessed generations will go elsewhere. But recent economic events and the resultant increase in unemployment probably mean the threat of leaving is something few are likely to throw at their employer right now.
One irony is that, in the age of consumerisation, it is often the bosses who help drive the process. If the CEO gets an Apple MacBook, for example, and wants to use it as his or her work computer, you can bet the IT department will do whatever is necessary to make it work. And if the IT department can do it for the boss . . .
The slightly uncomfortable question I ask myself is: where do those resellers who have built a reputation for providing ‘business class’ machines find themselves in a world where users can use whatever device they want to access the network? You see what I’m getting at when you’re looking at 10 years of supplying HP business PCs and laptops to corporate customers going up theLliffey because the customers are allowing their users to go out and buy whatever they like!
Or finding yourself being forced to provide a catalogue listing all manner of devices which, up until that point, you had studiously ignored as being ‘too lightweight’ or ‘underpowered’ for serious business use. Not to mention the poor sucker working in sales at HP or wherever on a target to sell business products into corporate clients.
In his keynote, Templeton spoke of an “epic battle” between the momentum of consumerisation and “the inertia of dead ideas”. Ordinarily, I’d be in the ranks of the side combating inertia – but in this case I can’t help wondering whether large parts of the channel and the vendor hardware community might find themselves on the other side in this battle. To start with, at any rate, until their customers decide it’s time for them to change their minds.
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