Consumerization of IT (Photo credit: Ross Mayfield)
They BYOD (bring your own device) movement is weakening the IT departments ability to manage and if I go Post Hoc Ergo Proctor Hoc (if this, therefore, thenfore that) consumerization of the enterprise (COtE) would be the death star for IT Managers according to Gartner which makes their money mostly from those managers.
When reading through today's post by GigaOm's Barb Darrow I also had the feeling that the more BYOD and COtE increases the less reliant anyone becomes on Gartner or other large analysts firms, and the more they become dependent on GigaOm and other media outlets as we already hear constantly that company engineering talent love to read TechCrunch and get their news from The Verge and others before they get their insights from analyst firms.
For me this also implies the need for greater hands on evalution of cloud services, more tests, and less reliance on hype and grandiose challenges. Companies still buy from Cisco, IBM, Citrix, Oracle and others who despite "old school" approaches at times, have the financial wherewithal to sell to a Verizon, AT&T or SONY, when the little startup, backed by angels can't do it as easily. That's where partnerships with those larger companies, being part of their eco-system comes into play. Take Dell for example. Their BOOMI platform brings alot of disparate services together, allowing upstarts to become a part of the cloud fabric, yet also enabling larger companies to be interested in those services. Rearden Commerce in travel services is another example of the cloud as the services warehouse and distributor.
Thus Gartner's point about IT getting it's head into the cloud is spot on...as the IT managers have to do it, or their future is dead ended as the end user in companies will simply go to the cloud from their consumer devices, and bypass IT as the costs of IT are assigned back to their group anyway, and the end user is the one who needs the service, not the IT department.
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