IT 'consumerisation' hits the enterprise

Johannesburg, 03 Aug 2009

Application subscriptions will be the future of enterprise IT, according to James Stevenson, area VP for Citrix Systems UK, Ireland and SA.

Stevenson spoke about the consumer use of IT and its impact on the enterprise at the Citrix 2009 Solution Seminar, held in Johannesburg last week.

“With Web 2.0 we have seen dissidence between how consumers and enterprises use IT. Things like social networking have been widely used by consumers and the enterprise is only slowly making use of it now. This is one of the things that will change the way enterprises do business as part of the comsumerisation of enterprise IT,” Stevenson said.

He is adamant the enterprise will move to a consumer experience model, where a variety of applications and hardware will be able to run on almost any architecture, without any lock-in to a specific vendor or propriety solution, through the use of virtualisation technologies. This will be the main driver for enterprise IT consumerisation, Stevenson believes.

These predictions are echoed by analyst company Gartner, which said consumerisation will be the single biggest trend affecting corporate IT in this decade.

According to Stevenson, the key is that “everything needs to be simple”. “Simplicity makes the organisation more agile and will save companies huge costs. Complexity is costing too much.”

Power of one

Other drivers of the move towards enterprise IT comsumerisation, Stevenson noted, are purely economic. “The cost of storage, servers, networks and applications are much cheaper in the consumer space than in the enterprise world.”

He added that companies should try “getting to one“, where they build once and leverage to infinity. This means that companies, through server, desktop and application virtualisation, only have one copy of each application, one image of each workload, one desktop OS image, one password and identity for employees, one instance of data, and most importantly, create one user experience across various systems and networks.

“In future, IT will advertise services and users are going to subscribe to what they need, just like what is happening in the consumer world today. Organisations will then also realise cost savings, as they will pay only for what they use,” Stevenson said.

This is what Stevenson terms the “self-service” aspect of IT, where organisations make the decisions on what they want and when they want it, increasing the company and its IT department's flexibility.

Stevenson believes the future will be one where end-users have the same user experience of technology wherever they are, with whatever device they use, no matter what the back-end infrastructure is.