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EUC part 1 of 3

Its day two of FLISH MADNESS and today’s topic is End User Computing.

Recently I was on plane flight coming back from Las Vegas and I looked around half way through the flight to see that 80 % of the people around me were using some type of tablet computing device.  I thought to myself the post PC era is truly underway.  But, we have ways to go.  First and for most we still have too many devices per person.  Case in point, I carry my laptop, iPad and iPhone to every meeting I go on.  Ideally we would combine at least two of these devices if not all three.

I envision a world where we have one device (call it an identity disc) where we jack in to computing resources (public, private, personal cloud) as needed.  <a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/ipad-3rd-generation-mifi">Some of us</a> are already taking steps in this direction.  For example, the Cisco Cius can be “docked” into a station where you would have the full keyboard, monitor and mouse capabilities of a traditional desktop.  From there you could launch native applications, VDI from Citrix or VMware or some type of legacy application presentation.

End User computing is one of the most spoken buzz words across all tech industry verticals today.  The actual meaning of the term may depend on whom you are speaking with.  But what it boils down to is empowerment for users of the users and by users.  In IT we no longer live in a world where we have the luxury to control what end point device the users bring to work.  We do have the ability control the corporate data, how the data gets to the end user (including how it is presented), and finally how the data is secured.

To summarize this line of thought, EUC needs three things to be successfully deployed in an IT environment.

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<ol>
	<li>Device agnosticism aka BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)</li>
	<li> Application abstraction / Modern Application development HTML 5, Soap etc</li>
	<li> Secure MDM (Mobile Device Management)</li>
</ol>
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<strong>Device Agnosticism</strong>

It’s happened to every IT admin out there.  A VIU (very important user) for example a CEO or CFO brings in his latest and greatest smart phone and expects it work seamlessly with all corporate systems.  This of course is as tremendous challenge but surmountable with the right technology applied.

The idea of bringing your own device to work simple put makes the user feel “empowered”.  A user that is empowered with end point choice is usually happier than one that isn't.  Furthermore, if IT can “containerize” the corporate assets that the end user needs on their chosen device they open the door for getting out of the end user hardware business and getting into software as a service.

Think about it, as an IT admin you want to profile, image, and streamline your end user’s experiences; that way you have consistent, manageable interfaces that the user cannot meddle with.  This would seem almost impossible if everybody brought their own device.  Unless, we abstract the corporate resources needed by the end user thus sandboxing the corporate experience from the chosen end point device.  We’ll get into the specifics of how this can be done in EUC part 2 and 3.

Stay tuned as FLISH MADNESS continues tomorrow as we continue the EUC conversation.