CRN roundtable discussion: Commoditisation of IT

Scott: New employees, particularly younger ones, are looking at ‘what’s in it for me?’, ‘I want to work for an employer who’s moving forward, and I want some flexibility, I want some freedom – I want to work in this Notebook or work in an iPad or work in a particular way; ‘I don’t want to have to have a BlackBerry or be locked to a PC’. To a certain extent I think some of those needs or demands or wants of prospective employees are also going to drive change in terms of you bring your own devices, and the carrier you use as well.

Sydney: This creates a massive problem from an IT department’s point of view, for maintaining all those devices. We’re throwing out exactly what we talked about years ago, when we talk about standard operating environments. There’s no such thing as an SOE any more.

Scott: Well there is because the actual operating environment is no longer the hardware, it’s the virtualising of IT.

Sydney: Sure, but when it comes to drivers and the equipment that you want to drive in the office, then it does become the hardware.

Chris: I think the problem is recognising it, and that the force we’re up against here is an irresistible object, and like you say whether it be Gen Y driving it, people demand that level of flexibility and personalisation and I think that we as players in the industry have got to work out how we best adapt to that environment. I think it’s going to happen whether we like it or not.

Norman: You are a hardware vendor. One of the challenges we find when we’re buying new notebooks for example, is Microsoft will bring out the latest version of Windows and all of a sudden it’s been a huge success, because they’re selling so many copies. Well that’s because the PC vendors will only sell you the latest version of Windows when you buy a new laptop, and it’s actually really hard to get the old version that actually works. We connect to corporate applications, or our customers connect to corporate applications ‘sorry it doesn’t support ‘x’ but guess what, it comes pre-installed on the laptop when you buy it’ and if the hardware vendors were a little more flexible in the demands of the corporate on what their SOE needed, then I think that would be a good thing.

Brett: We have got into establishing profiles and controlling what people can actually do at work on their pieces of hardware that they bring in. I think nowadays you do have this problem that people have iPads, android devices, tablets and we’re moving into an age where everything is an application. I think it’s going to be up to either the IT departments or the internet service provider, and the telco in effect, to control what is able to be consumed or used by the consumer under a profile for that particular person.

Anthony: We see the direction going very much into that integration and applications space and into the cloud space. We see that for us our customers will dictate what it is that we will provide them. So we will provide them with apps service and SLAs and we will manage that process, whether it’s cloud solutions or the applications that we require. That’s where we’re heading, so in terms of the devices, they could be any brand, any type, provided that we give them a solution that gives them this outcome, that is the direction NEC will be taking. 

Mathew: I think it’s got to tie into your policies, and the security policies that you’ve set up what you spend a lot of time to work out, are those policies in a standard operating environment and that needs to remain consistent in how to weigh and manage that.

Brett: Yes, and I think if you do have phones and you know that person is going to be leaving your organisation and accessing that data in a mobile environment, you have also got the problem that you’ve got the local carrier who’s enforcing that profile locally, and what do you do when that person goes overseas to another country, because they’re not going to have a carrier there. So I think it’s going to be profile based for security companies if you have an application on the device that has got a profile which can work anywhere in the world, then I think that’s going to be the way business is going.

Norman: We moved over to Google Apps, so we use Google corporate mail etc, and that’s easy, because when somebody leaves, I’ve got all his mail, all his data and mail on a central server. He can’t go and wipe his PC and all his history has just gone with his Outlook. I’ve got it centralised on the server and when I go to the US I’ve just got it wherever I am, and even then, when I do leave my laptop and phone on the train, etc, but it’s easy just to pick up another one and you’re there and logged on and so from that perspective cloud is a corporate environment is really good and it helps you manage security with profiles better.Scott: There are a number of clients confused there whether it be the ATO or other regulatory bodies which require that that information be held in Australia or if there’s a period of time that that information has to be retained for, and in five years’ time you go looking for some document and gee it’s not there, well whose responsibility is that? Is that the cloud service provider’s responsibility, or a federal problem.

Hwei: I was going to add on in terms of the policies. I think what’s going to be important is that the employees need to have not just a written document that they sign, but they actually have to understand the risk and implications of what they’re actually doing in using their phones, even voice data is an issue as well in terms of could they be tapped into, what’s happening there when they’re talking about confidential company information on their phones, say in a different country. A lot of companies that we’re talking to say they’re not even sure how to develop the policy, but their employees have absolutely no idea what’s going on.

Anthony: What is bothering me more though is this aspect of social media, where a lot of people now used to using Facebook have no concept of security associated with that. 

Brett: What we’re seeing in that area as an organisation, is in the last two or three years ago when we saw Facebook becoming so prolific and so popular with everyone – especially the young adults, 18 to 24. For those people it’s part of their lives; they expect to have that access in a work environment. We blocked Facebook completely, because we found that some people were spending 80 percent of the day on Facebook in the office, just having it open and doing stuff. Same with Tweeting as well, but in the last six months we’ve just completely opened that all up, purely for the fact that a lot of people are using Facebook for a business application as well now. You get to the point in an organisation where you actually start monitoring the content. So that if they are on Facebook you start doing searches on the sort of words that they’re using which is to flag, are they doing real business related to work are they doing CRM stuff and trying to increase the sales of the company?

Grant: I think the risk is though that after the message is out there, it’s then too late to moderate it.

Norman: Another question I wanted to ask people; we talked about devices, how do people feel about the fact that the lifetime of the device is just coming down and down and down, and your iPhone 3, 4 whatever, is six months, three months? How on earth do you manage a corporate policy for devices and rolling out devices, when by the time that you can actually roll out around your organisation a new device it’s obsolete?

Scott: I think this is where it’s about the application rather than the actual underlying hardware platform, because when you talk about something that’s application based or virtualised, it’s independent of the platform, but you can bring your own and you can update it for three months or three years, it doesn’t really matter.

Sydney: But they don’t all work.

Scott: That’s true, but sure you can update your phone every three months, but they don’t all work. They all come out with bugs or problems, there are issues, driving issues, features of the device. I can’t get this driver to work etc.

I think there is an increasing opportunity. I mean we’ve all talked about policies and education and there is definitely opportunity here for technology organisations, not just to be people or organisations that are talking about technology, but also providing guidance to their customers.

CRN: The other thing we are probably all guilty of is wearing rose-tinted glasses with regard to cloud applications and things like Google Apps and Google Docs. But how well do they really integrate with existing systems, the Oracle systems and SAP systems?