The next BriefingsDirect panel discussion explores one of the most broadly deployed
collaboration platforms,
Microsoft SharePoint, to determine how it's rapidly evolving from local network portal roots into the new
cloud and
mobile era.
Delivering
information as an actionable asset in a widely collaborative and
increasingly mobile environment has clearly become a top business priority.
Business architects need the agility enabled by such unshackled
information sharing and contextual collaboration to keep pace with
distributed services and a
boundaryless enterprise approach to their operations and commerce.
This is why IT leaders worldwide recognize that they
must better manage knowledge, share information more safely, and yet
rapidly and securely enable mobility among workers and their activity.
We’ve assembled a group of
recently selected top SharePoint influencers to learn where they think Microsoft SharePoint is headed, along with newer
services like
Office 365, to gauge how companies can best exploit and
extend such productivity services.
To better understand how enterprise collaboration and document management are being
transformed by new cloud and mobile requirements, the expert panel consists of
Christian Buckley, Director and Chief Evangelist at
Metalogix Software in Redmond,
Washington;
Yaacov Cohen, Co-founder and CEO of
harmon.i.e;
Joel Oleson, Director of Marketing and Technology
Evangelism at
ViewDo Labs in Salt Lake City, and
Laura Rogers, Manager of SharePoint Consultants at
Rackspace Hosting.
The discussion is moderated by me,
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: SharePoint was designed quite some time
ago to play a somewhat different role. Organizations need to start thinking about cloud,
or even clouds -- and learn how to manage across them, to do collaboration and
safely shared documents. How well suited is SharePoint to take on this new
role?
Rogers:
It's interesting, because some of the bread-and-butter of SharePoint is
being able to collaborate on documents. One of the main things that
people have done with SharePoint over the years is
in moving from file-shares to SharePoint. So that’s just getting things
from file-shares to being able to collaborate with them easier.
Now, a lot of things are moving to the cloud.
Everything that people do in their daily lives is based on the cloud. People are used to being
able to pick up their
iPhone and have a
FaceTime conversation. They’re
used to being able to pick up their phone and check
Facebook.
All
these different applications are in the cloud, and it's part of people’s
daily life. Now, they have this expectation of being able to have all
this live information and collaboration going on with what they're doing
at work as well.
Microsoft is moving to Office
365 and is doing a lot with the integration between Office 365 and the
Office apps, being able to take files, quickly edit them on the phone,
and then quickly upload them to SharePoint. In general, people have
expectations of being able to collaborate wherever they are.
That’s
where the pressure is coming from for enterprises to either physically
move their data to the cloud and go to Office 365, or at least upgrade
and keep all of their on-premises technology up-to-date, so that the end
users have that seamless experience.
But that gets
more and more complicated, because of all the different servers you
would need to have involved -- like the latest version of SharePoint, the
latest version of
Exchange, the latest version of
Lync. As it gets more
and more involved to do those things on-premises, that’s where some
companies are saying, “Let's just go do it in the cloud. It might be
easier.”
Gardner: Christian, given the
fact that we’re seeing increased complexity, it's one thing to move
storage to the cloud and share documents across a cloud service. It's
something quite more complex to bring a process into the cloud, manage
the process, and have it extended across the boundaries of the
organization. Are companies yet progressing to that point?
Buckley:
You've hit on the complexity of what actually moves across. Look
historically at
intranets. I started getting involved in the intranet
knowledge management space in the mid ’90s, and organizations approached
building out those intranets and building the complexity of their work
processes into digital form. That’s why automation, whether it's your
dashboarding, workflows, and all those capabilities, fit into how
SharePoint has been built out.
What's changed is that
as all of these consumer-based technologies, which are primarily out in
the cloud, have progressed, organizations want to focus less on
infrastructure and focus more on actual
business systems. End users on
the other side of that want their corporate solutions to match more
closely to their personal habits, to their personal tools. They're doing
everything in the cloud, everything via a mobile phone.
Just want access
As
you look at those changes to the traditional intranet model, how you
approach and develop those solutions, build and maintain an
infrastructure, and all the complexity, the difficulty is that end users
are ahead of the curve. They want to have everything in the cloud
flexible, dynamic, and real time via their phone or their tablet.
They're out on the road. No matter how they're accessing the
information, they just want access to it.
The
difficulty is that not all of the technology is yet at parity with what
you have on-prem, and that’s where
SharePoint is at this crossroads.
That’s what we’re starting to experience. The consumer is driving what's
happening within the corporation, rather than corporate IT driving what
end users have access to. That’s a huge change.
Gardner:
Joel, it sounds as if we have businesses seeking agility
and trying to find any way to improve the speed of doing business, but
that there is tension between allowing on-premises systems to catch up,
versus leap wholesale out to a cloud. Is that how you see it and how
does that portend the future of SharePoint?
Oleson:
There's an interesting transition happening right now where there is a
big move to the cloud and a lot of companies are looking out at things,
asking, "Is this
Tinkertoys? Is this something that’s a trend? Is it
something bigger? Do we need to invest here?"
In the
beginning, it was seen as more of a hosting move where there are
companies that are doing this hosting, and now Microsoft wants to do
hosting, and there are these various companies that are out there doing
hosting. What we’re seeing now is a transition of a technology, where
it’s this trend of "cloud first," and where the actual product is being
developed and the features are showing up first in the cloud.
This
trend of hitting features a year ahead of time and being able to
validate and get richer experiences in the cloud that may never have
come on-premise, is really making customers look at it quite
differently. There are business solutions that enable, in terms of
making it easier, and someone else is taking care of upgrades and
someone else is taking care of your infrastructure needs. So you really
focus on your business value from that perspective.
Also,
when you look at it from the perspective of this approach of cloud
first, on-premise second, on-premise comes across as the second-class
citizen. A lot of these arguments that have held people back are around
security, such as not wanting other people managing your data, and that
bigger concern around how to best handle the situation. With SharePoint,
that trend is going to continue.
Gardner:
Yaacov, thinking about the complimentary nature of cloud services and
mobile devices, we’re seeing not just an interest in going to cloud for
cloud's sake, but being able to better deliver services across boundaries
and out to mobile devices -- maybe even to
bring-your-own device (BYOD).
After listening to our panelists, our
top influencers, how do you see
something like the on-premise world readily adapting to both the needs
of the cloud and mobile?
Cohen:
Our panelists talk about these very significant transitions. Not only
is Microsoft at a crossroads, but the customers and the large SharePoint
shops are also at a crossroads. It's about a "cloud first" for Microsoft,
and now
with the recent announcements, it's also about "mobile first."
Now,
we see that Microsoft is very serious about
iOS, about the
iPad, and
also about
Android. Your question was well pointed. There are two
different types of scenarios when you're accessing the cloud and Office
365 for mobile devices. I know we're talking SharePoint, but in fact,
there are two different products now: the
OneDrive which earlier used to
be SharePoint Online, and the SharePoint On-Premise.
Different scenarios
There
are two different business scenarios where a lot of what Microsoft is
looking at, including on mobile access, is more of a document-saving,
document-storage, document-sharing capacity. It's very consumer centric,
very competitive to
Dropbox, and may also compete with
Box, and be very
easily accessible from mobile devices.
Now we have
Office on the iPad. That’s really a huge statement from Microsoft’s
standpoint. But then, there is a totally different scenario looking at
SharePoint as a knowledge center, as a record management center, and as
the core of the business processes for the enterprise.
That’s
not quite addressed right now by Microsoft with the "cloud first" and
"mobile first" approach. With the "mobile first" approach, there's no
real attempt by Microsoft to try to continue to support Office 365 or
SharePoint Online as a
knowledge center. We've also made our data and
tags and taxonomy.
The focus is much simpler. They want
to be a Microsoft-centric Dropbox, providing very easy access for
mobile devices. So we're talking about two very different scenarios.
This is a pretty interesting time also for end users. They need to be a
lot more accurate in the business requirements they're trying to solve
either with OneDrive for document sharing or SharePoint for knowledge
management.
Gardner: It seems to me that having
the ability to compete with Dropbox and share documents is really table
stakes at this point. The larger proposition is enabling a hybrid
transition and enabling better management and control over the
complexity, even as we expand the extent to which we’re collaborating.
Laura,
as users begin to think about how to not
just deal with this tactically, but to think about that larger hybrid
cloud capacity -- where the control remains internal with the best of
cloud access -- how do you think they're
viewing SharePoint? Is there a change in the perception of what
SharePoint does?
Now we have
Office on the iPad. That’s really a huge statement from Microsoft’s
standpoint.
Rogers:
The perception of SharePoint is changing a little bit, but it depends
on who you are, where you are coming from, and what type of organization
you are in.
For some people,
especially smaller companies that are a little bit more flexible as to
where they can store their data and how fast they can get their data
moved, their perception is that if they can't move to Office 365, they
want to quickly figure out a way to get hosted SharePoint and get all of
their data into the cloud.
So they're analyzing Office
365 and they're figuring out if it will do everything they need it to
be able to do. Of course, if you're a
smaller or a mid-size company,
you're a little bit more flexible, because you might have fewer custom
applications and things like that. So they're analyzing that, they're
analyzing other methods of putting things in the cloud, and they are
comparing them.
When it comes to bigger organizations, and organizations that have more
restrictions such as governments and healthcare and things where you
have to have
HIPAA and different regulations considered, they have a
whole different perspective.
Very hesitant
They're
thinking how they can keep SharePoint where it is right now in a lot of
cases. Then, they're researching to see how other companies that have
their same sort of stipulation and are going into the cloud. They're going
to be very hesitant.
The perspective is going to be
that the cloud to them is a little bit more dangerous and scary, because
they don’t want to have anything happen to their very sensitive data.
But they're researching and figuring out all the different ways that
they can do hybrid environments, so they can still have some of their
intranet in the cloud and have it connected to their on-premises
solution. So there is going to be a lot of hybrid situations going on as
people gradually get weaned over to the cloud.
They're
going to have combinations of some information here and some
information there. The trick is going to be to make it look seamless to
the end user and have them be able to just go to SharePoint, whatever
SharePoint happens to be, wherever it happens to be, do a search and
have the search come up with everything.
So it's
"SharePoint wherever" in all the different locations that it might be,
have it just look like a seamless interface to end users, and have
everything that they do in that environment be seamless. Because when it
comes to the IT people and the decision makers, they have a lot of
things to worry about when it comes to where to put the data, how to
migrate it, and how to be able to get to it for backups and things like
that.
As
long as those decision makers don’t forget that the end users just want
to be able to do their jobs and not have everything be more complicated
than it needs to be.
They have to keep remembering that the end user
wants to be able to have something simple, that they know where to go,
the interface is familiar, and then just be able to do their jobs. As
long as those decision makers don’t forget that the end users just want
to be able to do their jobs and not have everything be more complicated
than it needs to be.
Gardner: Christian,
it seems that the opportunity for Microsoft here is to make SharePoint
the entry point, the face, if you will, of both
hybrid cloud activities
and mobile collaboration activities. It's a tremendous opportunity for
them.
How do you feel about the perception of people
in the field, those users and those managers at enterprises? Are they
seeing SharePoint as the potential silver bullet for managing this
complexity, or do they see it more as a steppingstone to something else?
Buckley:
There are a couple of things. We're talking about perceptions, right?
There's some talk within the expert community about SharePoint as the
brand, when I talk about going out to my SharePoint system. You're
hearing the word SharePoint less and less. It doesn’t mean that the
technology is going away. It's more that it's becoming ubiquitous.
When
you think about the various Microsoft properties that they’re building
on top of, OneDrive,
Yammer, and within Office 365, a lot of those
various components, where there is content and where there is a process
or workflow and other things that are related.
When
you're talking about some of the
PowerBI, the dashboarding capability,
you're talking about SharePoint. That’s where the data is stored behind
that. It's the unifying technology underneath the platform.
Current perception
Backing
up a bit, the perception is about the control, administration,
compliance, auditing, and all those options. The perception is that that
you have less of an ability to do those things out in the cloud.
Government
bodies, highly regulated industries, went to SharePoint and on-prem
because they had that level of control and the ability to go in and
configure and customize and add-on and extended all those things.
SharePoint grew so rapidly, because of that ability, but they are very
correct in some of those perceptions about not having the same degree of
control out in the cloud.
There is not yet parity
when you think of it in those terms. The tools need to mature. The
application programming interfaces (APIs) need to be expanded. On the
flipside, those perceptions of what you can and can't do and control out
in the cloud is because many organizations have overbuilt SharePoint.
End-user adoption is a serious issue, as it is for every enterprise
collaboration solution out there. Any competitor in the space that tells
you otherwise is marketing to you.
The reality is that
end users want something that is streamlined and that’s simple. They
want to click once, twice at the most, get in, and get their jobs done.
They don’t care what the brand is. Microsoft needs to extend and add,
increase the parity between Office 365, the
software-as-a-service (SaaS)
solution, the SharePoint Online, version of the on-prem version, get
that parity across it.
Microsoft
still has some messaging to improve on to help change some of those
perceptions of what SharePoint is, where it's going, and how people can
make that transition.
They need to make it easy to
access, easy to invite people in, easy to click once or twice, get to
the information that you need through the interface that you’re most
comfortable with, whether it's Exchange or Yammer or OneDrive or going
into SharePoint, going into your intranet or an extranet, with all of
those things. SharePoint underlies all of those things.
Microsoft
still has some messaging to improve on to help change some of those
perceptions of what SharePoint is, where it's going, and how people can
make that transition.
Gardner: Joel,
thinking about a more practical approach for the user organization,
rather than waiting for Microsoft to simplify SharePoint, maybe reduce
some of this overbuilding, making it more appropriate for cloud
activity, what can organizations do to take the best of what SharePoint
can do, leverage the investments they’ve made and yet still be able to
break out across boundaries, into cloud, into mobile?
Is there some basic blocking and tackling advice you can offer for using SharePoint, but in this new environment?
Oleson:
Some advice for customers ... They really need to dip their toe in the
water. Some customers, when they decide they want to go Office 365, go
all in and then they have second thoughts. It's not that people
shouldn’t invest in Office 365, but they need to be cautious about
understanding some of those limitations around customizations and some
concerns that other departments may have: IT, for example.
So
there's a cautious approach, and a pilot needs to happen. OneDrive, as
an example, is an amazing way to start getting involved with the cloud.
Yammer, as well, is a great way to get into the cloud and also to, all
of a sudden, be able to support with mobile devices great conversations
with fellow employees.
Taking advantage
But
part of that approach is getting the right kind of policies and
procedures in place that can support the users and the departments that
want to, and need to, take advantage of the new technology.
But
I don’t think that it's throwing everything out there willy-nilly.
There's that approach of going service by service. Another example is
people who are going to move their email. It's a no-brainer to move your
email out there, but there is some identity work that has to be done,
and the budgets have to be right to be able to understand the
investments and the time it's going to take.
But that
hybrid process of moving things out there is a multi-year approach, and
the investment that’s going to be required has to be a conscious
decision in having the right engines firing on all cylinders and making
that transition. It takes all eyes open as you make that transition.
Gardner:
Yaacov, what advice do you have for organizations that are in
SharePoint deeply, who want to continue to leverage that investment,
recognize that their users are getting a lot of value from it, but also
want to start extending their activities using hybrid approach to more
application by application transitions, as Joel mentioned?
The “cloud first”/"mobile first" marketing is very
nice, but it's not ready yet to deliver a sole business solution.
Cohen: Joel had some good
points about the progressive approach, looking service by service. Also,
it's about defining your business requirements and, for example, to
differentiate between collaboration scenarios, which are more ad hoc,
more social, and which say more about p
roject management and not so much
about
knowledge management. So in this case, Office 365, OneDrive, and
Yammer is a great way to go. We're already investing a lot of
preparation in taxonomy and the information architecture.
But
if you're looking at more enterprise-wide projects to share knowledge
across multiple business lines or you're trying to reduce the
liabilities with record management, that’s where you probably need to
take a more comprehensive approach with more preparation and design. You
need to know that the “cloud first”/"mobile first" marketing is very
nice, but it's not ready yet to deliver a sole business solution.
Gardner:
Laura, tell us about what you’re
doing as a SharePoint Consultant Manager and what Rackspace Hosting is
doing vis-Ã -vis collaboration and SharePoint Services?
Rogers:
At Rackspace around SharePoint we have a couple of major divisions. We
have people that support our hosted SharePoint environments and we also
have SharePoint consulting. A lot of our hosted SharePoint customers
will make use of the consulting services. But we also provide consulting
services to people who aren’t necessarily hosted at Rackspace.
We
have different types of hosting that you can get there. We have a
per-user environment, which basically means you're buying site
collection, and it's similar to Office 365 and there is one big farm
that’s managed in a central place. You’re not necessarily in control of
your SharePoint environment.
Different levels
There
is also one where you can have your own SharePoint server. So there are
all different levels of being able to have a hosted environment. As
consultants, we can take care of those clients.
But we
get a lot of clients that come to us and say they're looking at
Rackspace hosting and also looking at Office 365. They ask why they
should do one or the other. We go through their requirements and what
they want to be able to do in SharePoint. Then, we help them to talk
about the pros and cons. We explain "You have this custom app over here
and you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do that in Office 365."
They
have all this super custom branding, little technical things that they
have, and we go through some of the tradeoffs they might have to make,
one way or the other.
We have different groups of
consultants. I manage the group that deals with business solutions. We
have a group of developers. We have a group of branding guys, and then
my business-solutions guys have out-of-the-box functionality,
business intelligence (BI), user adoption,
governance, documentation, and things
like that. Business solutions includes things that don’t involve custom
code and things that don’t involve branding. I also teach at SharePoint
2013 Power Users class online for a week each month.
There are
all different levels of being able to have a hosted environment. As
consultants, we can take care of those clients.
Every
Wednesday at 11 Central, my team and I get together and we have a free
YouTube broadcast, where we just talk about some business-solution
topic, do demos, and things like that. That’s the SharePoint at
Rackspace YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/sharepointrax.
Gardner:
Christian at Metalogix, tell us a little bit about what you do
there, and what your organization does in the SharePoint community, or
eco-community.
Buckley: My role is Chief
Evangelist. So I sit across multiple areas. I work very closely with
product management and product marketing. I work very closely with our
partner and alliance management team. I do a lot of meeting with
customers, meeting with partners, and setting up and investigating
various technology partnerships.
From a community
standpoint, I'm also very involved in helping organize various community
efforts and, in that way, spreading goodwill for the brand out there
within the community. I've helped launch about a dozen SharePoint
Saturday events primarily out in the Western U.S. states.
Then,
I travel around the world speaking at conferences, sharing perspective,
usually to the IT business decision-maker and executive crowd. I do
events where I travel on behalf of our partners and meet with their
customers. I try to help fill the pipeline from a sales perspective and
help partners on my own sales team close on deals and things that people
traditionally expect an evangelist to do.
Metalogix is
the largest, fastest growing SharePoint
ISV. Two areas that we are
really known for are migration and governance and administration
solutions. I write a lot of content around those topics, as well as
things like storage optimization and replication.
Helping people
We're
very much involved in working with Microsoft and with our partners in
helping people manage and migrate between SharePoint environments, as
well as moving people from on-prem into Office 365.
We're
the only ISV that has a solution that migrates Exchange, public
folders, file shares, and SharePoint content to Office 365. So I'm doing
a lot of promotion and talking about those options out there on a
regular basis.
Gardner: Joel, tell us similarly about yourself and ViewDo Labs as well.
Oleson:
ViewDo Labs is focused on Yammer analytics. My role has been working
with the community around writing, speaking, and blogging.
I've
gathered a group of influencers in the enterprise social space. We get
together and talk about various topics around enterprise social and take
on the biggest challenges. I participate in a lot of conversations,
Tweetups, and variety of activities as they relate to enterprise social,
moving forward maturity around enterprise social as it relates to
Yammer and other technologies in that space.
Basically, we wanted to bring a customer-like user experience to the
enterprise world. We've built a one-screen user experience across
emails, mobile devices, and cloud.
As an
example, Christian talks about his travel. Travel is something that’s
been a big passion of mine, connecting with folks around the globe and
building communities. Just a week ago I was in Jamaica running a
SharePoint Saturday, but also launching a user group. I’ll
be speaking at a European SharePoint conference. Following that, I'll be
doing some travel in Central Asia and launching a community in
Uzbekistan.
A passion of mine is expanding global
reach and connecting communities that otherwise would never meet people
that are on the top tier speaking circuits. I try to go to those
locations where they’re underserved markets, you could say. But the big
focus is on enterprise social and working transparently, working like a
network, and just getting excited and working with businesses around how
that big transformation is happening.
Gardner: Yaacov, tell us a little bit about why you co-founded
harmon.ie and what harmon.ie does and how that fits into the SharePoint
ecosystem?
Cohen: We founded harmon.ie in 2008.
Basically, we wanted to bring a customer-like user experience to the
enterprise world. We've built a one-screen user experience across
emails, mobile devices, and cloud.
We provide a suite
of connected apps on mobile devices like iOS, Android,
Windows Phone and
BlackBerry. Within Outlook, we provide an
Outlook plug-in, delivering
the same consistent user experience across on-premise SharePoint,
Yammer, and Office 365.
The idea is to help the
business users to get a complete view of their network and their
colleagues’ network in order to be more efficient at the enterprise
level in the ways they manage knowledge management, knowledge centers,
record management, and how they can really evolve into more of a social
enterprise, which is really collaborating and working like a network.
That’s what we try to do.
Social collaboration
Gardner:
I’d like to just address
one more issue before we sign off, and it's the impact of social
collaboration. People are now looking at the walled interface, being
used to things like Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twitter, and then
recognizing that that’s a powerful way to get knowledge transferred and
allow for people to work together, but now also recognizing that more
and more people are using mobile devices.
And so
there's this combination, this
Reese’s cup of peanut butter and
chocolate, when it comes to mobile and
social. How do you all think that
this is going to be driven into use -- will the technologies keep up
with the demand on the user experience and behavior?
First
to you, Christian. What do you foresee as the methods that the
IT department will have to adopt and the technologies that they will
have to exploit in order to start allowing users to do what they want on
a mobile device and be more collaborative in a social type of way?
Buckley:
It's evolving so rapidly. To say what technologies they need to start
considering, I take a very pragmatic, project program management
approach to this. That’s a lot of my background. Working with customers,
it would be to fully understand what you are trying to accomplish for
the business.
If you're recognizing that your end
users are requesting more social and mobile capabilities and yet you
have certain constraints, compliance and auditing, regulatory
requirements, sometimes legal requirements that you need to make sure
all systems comply with, you just need to make sure that the solutions
that you are building out, the technologies that you go investigate, can
comply with those needs.
You need to ask those
questions and then make some decisions, which could mean paring back on
your requirements.
And certainly, if you go
with Office 365 and social through Yammer, whether a standalone Yammer
or Office 365, and if you're going to build a hybrid solution, these are
questions you need to ask and understand, which may determine how you
configure the platform or which options you choose.
We're
not at a place where you can plug and play, even in the Microsoft
stack, any of those tools and just assume that you're going to meet all
of those standards that you need to be held to. You need to ask those
questions and then make some decisions, which could mean paring back on
your requirements. It may be a phased approach, as you wait for further
advances, but it's just something. Ask the questions and go into it with
your eyes wide open.
Gardner: Joel, the
same question. How do you see organizations being able to manage this
risk-and-benefit balance between allowing users to get what they want
for functionality and collaboration, but also keeping it inside the
organization and limiting them in some other way? How do you balance
this best, and how will that balance perhaps change over the next few
years?
Oleson: Well, that’s really interesting.
This is really a battle between wills. Microsoft is making some major
bets, and some of those bets aren’t just with the IT department. It's
the business departments that are really going to make and drive some of
these decisions. And if the IT department essentially holds back the
business, they may find that they are going to go around.
So
there are going to be some pros and cons and cost benefits, especially
as it relates to licensing, but I think you'll find that some of the
businesses are needing these technologies, and so it will essentially be
business IT units that will test the waters and may drive ahead of the
IT department in some cases.
IT as the enabler
It's
not going to be everybody all nodding their heads at the same time.
There's going to be some pilot theory happening and it's going to be the
proof is in the pudding. Where it's going is that IT is the enabler.
Are they going to be helping us make that transition and move, or is it
going to be marketing, or is it going to be HR or some of these other
business departments that essentially make that first bet in making some
of those decisions?
I'm finding that some of the IT
environments are actually more conservative and more cautious, where
some of the business departments see the benefits and they see that it's
going to be easier. It gives them more of that device approach that
they need, and they may get out ahead of IT. I expect that to happen in
many organizations.
Gardner: And Laura at
Rackspace, is it "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, adopt the cloud,
and let IT figure out how to catch up later?" Or from strictly a cloud
perspective, do you think that you can give those users what they want
in terms of social and mobile collaboration and keep the risk at a
managed level?
Rogers: Joel brought up a great
point about the technology and people just going around it if they don’t
have what they need. Not necessarily Rackspace, but a lot of companies
are coming across financial restrictions, because they might decide that
they do need x, y, z technology.
Because people are going to go around
and they are going to figure out a way to do something with whatever the
latest technology is, even if the company doesn’t provide a way to it.
They need to have
their own private Yammer network and actually purchase the enterprise
versions of that. Or they might need to purchase the enterprise version
of SharePoint or Box.net or whatever they happen to be using, and it
might be cost restrictive for them.
So this is going to
be a case where when you think about all of the people that might go
around and use different technologies, like using their personal
OneDrive to share things with people outside the company. That’s not
very secure. Neither is using other technologies they might come across
on random apps on their phone or on the web and start using that with
business information.
So when companies are thinking
about technologies like this for the enterprise and how cost restrictive
they are, how expensive they are, I think it's more something where you
have to weigh what could possibly happen with people uploading
sensitive information to all these uncontrolled locations and what's the
risk there compared to what you benefit from going ahead and purchasing
that enterprise level product or whatever it happens to be, and just
pay for it, and therefore you will be able to have a lot more control
over that data.
Because people are going to go around
and they are going to figure out a way to do something with whatever the
latest technology is, even if the company doesn’t provide a way to it.
Gardner:
Yaacov, it seems that regardless of whether the IT department leads or
the business leads and whether they use internal or external services,
getting these services visible and usable across any and all needed
screens and devices is going to be essential.
So,
given that it's still an open question as to how mobile and
collaboration and document sharing and social interactions evolve and
become delivered, what do you think is an important part of being able
to be in front of that and maybe accommodate whatever the outcomes are
on the back end?
What's appropriate
Cohen:
This is really a good point. When I work with IT, I advise IT to start
thinking differently about their job. Rather than being the gatekeepers,
they need to become enablers. They need to become like a systems
integrator and a service provider within their own organization. And
they need to take a look at mobile and cloud and see how they can take
these technologies and package them in a way that is appropriate for
their business users.
They need to look at the lines
of business or the departments as their customers and they need to act
and market solutions to these customers. This transforms also our
relationship as a vendor with IT. Rather than selling to IT, we are
partnering with IT in order to help them package and sell solutions
internally, mobile solutions in order to improve the business experience
and, as such, to boost the business initiative, collaboration, and
mobile.
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Gardner: So that’s a big challenge in terms of coming up with a test environment for each of those iterations. 
