Consumer Devices and the Enterprise Network
Reflecting on what he saw at CES, our author looks at the prospects for tighter integration of consumer and enterprise technology.
How much more tech savvy can the average consumer get? And what do we really mean by tech savvy? It was clear at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that consumers are moving into the same world of virtualization and centralized applications that enterprises are striving for. Virtually all of the innovation in consumer electronics is driven by entertainment. Businesses are driven by, well, business of all things. Where will these two worlds collide in the next few years, and how will consumer products impact enterprise computing and communications?
A PC Experience on Mobile Devices
On the first Thursday of 2011, I attended a CES session titled "The Hyper Connected Consumer--Integrating the Full PC Experience into a Personal Communications Device". While this session was targeted towards the consumer, it tackled many of the same issues that the business world is addressing regarding virtualization and supporting the same user experience across multiple types of devices. It's easy to create the same user experience on a standardized notebook or desktop within the enterprise, but supporting standards across multiple interfaces, from smart phones to even a television screen becomes more challenging.
Among the panelists there was a general consensus that large screens are not going away and that big screens and big televisions have had a resurgence. There was not as much agreement on whether content providers would standardize applications in order to service every HTML5 capable device. For the most part, the Hyper connected consumer session was about web based applications and focused on texting, watching content, watching friends and social networking. It was actually on my way, 20 minutes prior to this session that I felt like I saw the real answer to the user experience question at the Motorola exhibit. It's not a software solution, it's hardware.
Motorola Atrix
Motorola was displaying their new Atrix phone as the center of their exhibit. Atrix is a 4G phone with dual core processors at 1 GB each. It also has 1 GB of RAM and up to 48GB of storage, but what is really unique about it is the accessories. The Motorola Atrix can dock into a small cradle which is hooked up to a television via HDMI and will display 720 pixels on a high-resolution television screen to stream movies or enable web browsing over the integrated Firefox browser. The next OS upgrade on the Atrix phone promises 1080 pixels over HDMI, bringing as clear a view of the visual interface as most folks have on their desktops right now. This along with a Bluetooth paired keyboard completes the personal computer like interface, driven by a very powerful portable mobile device with processing power that’s comparable to the average PC of a few years ago.
The second accessory that comes with the Atrix is a laptop dock. This is a laptop keyboard and screen with a little docking station mounted in the rear for inserting the smart phone. The smart phone is where all of the files and processing power are stored. The laptop dock is nothing but form factor, an unintelligent keyboard and screen. When do I want a sophisticated smartphone? When it means I no longer need to carry my laptop. The Motorola laptop dock is lightweight at 2.4 pounds, but the real advantage is that it leaves all of the intelligence in the mobile device. This means that I when I am ready to fly on an airplane, I can carry on my smartphone and pack the laptop module without any fear of losing valuable or sensitive information if something happens to the laptop module.
For the consumer market I see this as a big step towards eliminating the need for a standalone PC or notebook. There were all kinds of other phones with similar high definition interfaces. In my opinion, they were not as turnkey or slick of a solution as the Motorola Atrix, but the common feature set shows where we are heading. It means that using a smart phone as a video player no longer means you have to watch movies on a dinky screen, and using the smart phone as your mobile computer no longer means you have to forgo a normal sized screen or be stuck with tiny keypads or virtual keyboards (Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I still work much faster on a standard QWERTY keyboard). Because there are so many Android phones with similar features that used to be exclusive to the iPhone, the growing industry's competition can only drive the cost of these devices down.
The Home Data Center
Consumers are virtualizing their computing experience in ways that everyone is aware of, such as online document and web based email, but there are other virtualization examples that are not brand new, but show an interesting trend. Citrix offers consumers GoToMyPC, which turns their home computer into a server for a remote client application; in essence it turns a home PC into a remotely accessible data center. Like any good enterprise data center, of course it can be backed up with a solution such as Carbonite or Trend Micro SafeSync. So in the home we can have a cloud based application for virtual access to the home environment (GoToMyPC), and cloud based storage solutions for the same set of data. Consumers have shown that they are very open to virtualized computing environments (another reason that the PC could be replaced by a dockable or paired tablet or smartphone.
Residential Media Gateways
Not everything a consumer uses will be hosted in the cloud. Once again, driven by entertainment, consumers will want to access all the stuff they have purchased, streamed or downloaded to multiple devices, including Internet enabled television sets. IPTV had a significant presence at CES, and the best place to store all that high volume content may not be in cloud storage. Residential Media Gateways, such as DLink’s DIR-657 and a storage solution such at their DNS-320 can provide a central repository for music and video in the home, even allowing remote access via their newly announced miiiCasa Home Gateway solution. If a consumer has already purchased rights to all of this media content, he/she will not want to pay an increasing monthly storage charge in the cloud every time there is a new addition to their entertainment library.
Next page: From the House to the Enterprise
