Bring Your Equipment (BYOE)

Its the next logical step in consumerization of IT.

Before the smart phone revolution, IT departments dictated what devices could come to the workplace and connect to corporate networks. Then the iPhones and Androids and personal Blackberries changed all that. iPads re-wrote even any of the remaining rules from the old era. Senior Management wanted iPads and IT was not going to stand in the way.

Now the consumerization of IT has reached a point where some hitherto forbidden questions are being asked openly. Why cant I bring my personal laptop to work ? (because you know, I have a faster, bigger, more stylish laptop that I like carrying around vs the corporate, drab, standard issue from Dell, IBM or HP) ?

Progressive IT management is no longer saying that is out of the question. They are turning this question around: How can we benefit from this trend ? How can we make this a win-win for both our users and for our organizations.

What if we gave users a fixed stipend at the time they joined the company and repeated every say three years to cover the cost of a laptop and dock etc. The user would get what they liked and perhaps augment the stipend with some personal spending and get the laptop of their dreams. The user in turn takes on the task of maintenance of the laptop and its support.

Well then, how do you maintain Security and Support for all those different form factors ? Isnt that terribly expensive ? The answer lies in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Corporations can setup what essentially comes down to Virtualization Hardware farms running software form VMWare, Microsoft or Citrix and project a standard desktop on to the personal laptop, ensuring that all corporate activity happens within this sandbox, with no leakage of data to the outside of the sandbox. Standard desktop image and standardized support within the sandbox. For support outside the sandbox, the user is invited to talk to the vendor that they got the laptop from.

So what is stopping this trend from taking off ? Two things

1. The Economics of Virtual DesktopVirtualization(VDI) has not yet become attractive for this to work. However as scale goes up and this technology gets commoditized the prices will come down as they always do in IT. 
2. IT departments are not quite ready internally to take on this task, change is difficult and will be slow in coming.

Expect some early adopter moves in 2012 aqd more mainstream adoption in 2013.

10 Technologies for 2011 : 10. Data Visualization Tools

Data Visualization Tools

An ever accelerating trend in information technology has been the growth in the volume of data that must be collected and processed within an enterprise. 10 years ago, it would have been rare for a data store to be over a terabyte except perhaps within federal agencies or other instituitions that deal with massive numbers of users or customers such as a Walmart and those that were worked in industries that are by nature data intensive: Oil Exploration, Stock Market analysis etc. Now terabyte data stores are common place and can often  be found in medium sized companies.

With the advent of cheap processing power in modern CPUs and advances in cheap relational database technology such as found in Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MySQL at the low end, and DB2, ORACLE, TeraData, Netezza at the high end, suddenly the Terabyte doesnt seem to be a daunting measure of workload any more.

However, the rapid increase in IT's ability to process data has not come with a commensurate increase in our ability to understand this data. The vast majority of intelligence generated from these giant data stores is still distributed to end users through paper based reports. They are produced by scheduled batch jobs that churn through oceans of data and distill their wisdom usually in the middle of the night when there are fewer users to slow the system down. This works well for many kinds of reports.

However there is a new kind of business intelligence platform that is now gathering momentum, upsetting the current equalibrium between the few remaining vendors after waves of consolidation have worked there way through the Industry. MicrosStrategy, SAP Business Objects, Cognos, Oracle, IBM are looking at the new kids on the block: QlikView, TIBCO Spotfire and Tableau as insurgents that bring disruptive technology.

These vendors focus on interpreting data on the fly and presenting various charts and graphs that are updated in real time in response to the users clicks. Some of them like QlikView cache vast amounts of compressed data in memory for very rapid response. These approaches change the fundamental paradigm of business intelligence: Paper Reports dont seem all that neccessary when you can explore your data visually in an instant.

It is very likely that these new approaches to processing data will lead the Business Intelligence majors to either develop extensions to their current stable of products that more directly support Data Visualization or simply decide that its cheaper to acquire these insurgents.

In either case, Data Visualization is here to stay!