Years from now we’ll look back at this past year, 2010, as a true transition year for corporate IT: The year consumer technology took over and kicked off many major trends that will eventually lead us to mainstream VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure). This transition, like many others, was driven by several technology trends, specifically:
* Device evolution. The rapid evolution of devices was actually kicked off a couple of years ago by the iPhone. I'm not one of those Apple zealots but I do have to give credit where credit is due. Prior to the iPhone, corporate IT maintained tight control over the devices that were in the enterprise, and the iPhone was the first device to make CEOs tell IT to find a way to make it work. I know the consumer trend was coming and this may have happened with or without the iPhone, but Apple certainly accelerated it. The iPad then took it to the next level. In fact, our research shows that tablets are now used by 4% of the workforce. While that may seem like a low number, it's remarkable considering the iPad has been around only a year or so. This has opened the floodgates and now Cisco, Avaya, RIM and others are making tablets, there are plenty of Android phones in the work place and there are more MacBooks than ever before.
* Wireless evolution. In late 2009 the 802.11n standard was ratified, and the technology has exploded in 2010. At n speeds there's very little difference in user experience between wireless and wired technology. I know Gig-E is faster than n but n is plenty fast for most applications. This has prompted many organizations to utilize wireless technology as the primary network instead of as an augmentation to the wired network. In addition, 2010 saw the wireless service providers market 4G wireless. People I've talked to that are inside the 4G footprint of a wireless provider have told me that 4G is lightning fast and a significant improvement over 3G speeds. This again helps permanently un-tether a worker from a cabled connection.
* Cloud based applications. While cloud has had its fair share of hype, the shift to the cloud is only a matter of time. The economics and IT flexibility are far too compelling for companies to ignore for much longer. Cloud based applications, or SaaS, have already proven their value for many organizations. No complex installations, nothing to maintain, just fire up a browser and start using the application.
What these technology trends have enabled is for users to be able to use any device wherever they are with nominal degradation in user experience. We've talked about this in the past but never quite been able to do it. As an example, we recently replaced Lotus Notes with corporate Gmail, which is a cloud based application. There's no software to install and it's accessible from any device I have. In fact, yesterday I was able to check my mail from my Windows based laptop, Apple iPad and Droid phone, and the user experience was comparable on each. This is the value that the intersection of wireless, device evolution and cloud based applications can bring. This is really just one step away now from VDI, where the non-cloud based applications get served up from the data center.
It's not just the users that gain benefits either. The IT departments will realize an advantage as well. Much of the day-to-day functional support can be moved to the user community, which allows the IT department to say yes to many of the requests they used to say no to. One organization I recently interviewed had rolled out a program where users were free to bring in whatever device they want, however the functional support and maintenance was up to the individual end user. The company put up functional wikis to let the users create a support community so Mac users can post questions to the Mac wiki, etc. Even though there’s a bit of an upfront cost to this, it's far outweighed by the amount of time the IT department used to spend doing maintenance of PCs and Windows (which it still does but on a smaller scale).
Over the next few years I would expect to see more companies adopt this kind of IT philosophy--push applications to the cloud, adopt VDI, give the users freedom to use whatever device they want to and off load the functional support and maintenance. Years from now when we look back at when this transition took place, we'll look at 2010 as the year that the technology came together to allow us to do this. I'm certainly looking forward to 2011 and beyond.
