People are the ultimate mobile devices in a world where enterprises are undergoing unprecedented changes.
This was the word for Mark Templeton, CEO of Citrix Systems, in a keynote address at the Citrix Synergy 2014 Conference in Anaheim, Los Angeles. The event saw 10 000 registered delegates attending, from 66 countries.
"The average person thinks that mobility is about mobile devices and mobile apps but, actually, mobility is about the ability to move or be moved," said Templeton. "That ability to move or be moved, I would want to think of it as movability of people, business, apps, data and desktops.
"In today's world, it is about making that movability easy, instant and fast so that you can react fast to planned or unplanned changes in business," he added.
According to Templeton, movability is important in the world of the world of business where there are massive trends around workplace reinvention to make business more efficient, especially as the millennial generation starts to take over.
Thus, he said engagement with that workforce becomes important. "In fact, workplace engagement has become a very important factor in every organisation because that's how you create a great place to work.
"We have also seen massive transformation in workflows supported by lots of technologies. We believe that when these things come together, business will be able to become flexible and agile for individual people, for business and for IT," he revealed.
To Templeton, the huge factor is being able to respond to changes happening in the world today.
Classically, he said, people joined organisations - they got job offers and then joined but, increasingly, this is becoming a thing of the past. "We think that infrastructure and solutions should allow organisations to join people easily and simply instead of the other way round."
He believes that this future can be empowered by allowing IT organisations to provide mobile workplace experiences to work anywhere, using any device, and to get the right capabilities at the right time.
"We have the new reality of the modern world where people are using personal devices using hyper-connectivity. We are trying to connect people that have tasks to do with the apps and data that they need to do this - be it writing a document, driving a transaction or all the things in between, around collaboration, sharing etc," said Templeton.
He added that companies today are being built around devices and services. However, he noted that the problem here is that devices and services have become available from anywhere.
In this world, he said, organisations should put experience first. "Organisations must separate this notion of devices and services and build infrastructure that that is adaptive, flexible to handle this new demand."
He pointed out that this infrastructure must be able to understand the context of what's going over the network and then deliver that in a way that is completely device- and location-independent.
According to Templeton, organisations need an end-to-end approach to be able to deal with the hyper world of services and devices. By so doing, he explained, services can be obtained anywhere and people can work anywhere.
"This allows for the DOS (don't own stuff) approach to the world - don't own devices; don't own services," he stated.
"To me, this sounds a whole lot like companies in the entertainment industry - iTunes, Netflix, Amazon etc. They don't own screens; and they don't own content but we consume their services because they are sitting in the middle and aggravating services in a high quality way and thinking about us as consumers. They are differentiating services with custom content designed to target the audience they are trying to reach."
The IT world can learn from this because what is happening here is the entertainment industry is able to leverage services and content in a way that allows people to enjoy it, Templeton noted.
IT should enable people to leverage any device and any service so that people can work anywhere, he concluded.
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