Why Businesses Need to Change to Meet 'Consumerization'

Yesterday at the Interop New York's keynote presentation, many spoke about how consumerization will have the most impact on how business enterprises transform their technology infrastructures. Accordingly to Citrix President and CEO Mark Templeton (from ChannelWeb), "At present, people can have a richer and more productive technology experience with their personal devices than they can at the office. The reason is that most enterprises are tied to legacy infrastructure that's slow to evolve -- and in a decade that's seen an explosion of consumercentric, endlessly customizable technologies, that's now a problem."

We couldn't agree more.

From the past decade, we've seen a gradual shift of businesses owning and managing IT infrastructure to today's popular IT outsourcing on a pay-per-use basis. In addition, companies are now demanding a more robust and dynamic infrastructure with high level of security, reliability and the ability for customization.

This is where VARs and service providers needs to focus on IT trends and key business transformation initiatives. It's indicative that businesses are now in control and they want cost-effective IT services on-demand. More and more hosted solutions have demonstrated solid ROI and now it all boils down to the decision makers' mindset to swap out the legacy infrastructure piece by piece to the "cloud" model.

This is why we continue to support our client with solutions such as Hosted Services and iTOS because we see this trend continue as more businesses realize that it is about the business not the IT.

Federal CTO: IT Is Part Of 'Federal Government Fabric'

Aneesh Chopra, the nation's first CTO last August, spoke at the National Association of State CIOs conference in Austin, Texas, to challenge state CIOs to work more innovatively and collaboratively in an effort to create a more standards-based data reporting structure. The idea is to rethink the traditional processes used to solve problems, integrate technology and to help develop new ways of interaction.

Accordingly to ChannelWeb, "The president has elevated IT into the fabric of how we run federal government. We want to collaborate with state and local governments," Chopra said.

President Barack Obama has challenged Chopra and his staff to solve IT problems in 90-day turnarounds.

Clearly, there is a sense of urgency from the government to embrace open communities in a time like this to thoughtfully stake out ambitious agendas for access, openness and transparency. And even for government, the message remains the same: IT is now a business strategy to help deliver solutions more quickly and less expensively.

Microsoft Strikes Back at Apple: Opens Second Retail Store

Last Friday, Microsoft opened its second retail store in Mission Viejo, California (first one in Scottsdale, Ariz). Nearly a thousand people showed up at the grand opening making it official to Apple that the war is on. There is no doubt that Microsoft is looking to built a stronger relationship with its retail customers from the success of Apple's retail strategy. Now Microsoft can showcase all of its relatively unknown products while looking to build buzz around Windows 7 PCs. Will the younger, mall-roaming audiences take interest in Microsoft? We'll have to wait and see.