Fast forward to the future

The enterprise landscape is changing, and ever more rapidly. Fleur Doidge sets off on a voyage of discovery

As you gaze around a modern, open-plan office with its neat rows of desks, it can be easy to imagine it was always thus. But only a decade or two ago, individuals were more likely to be cubicle dwellers, and decades before that, many even had their own separate offices - something only upper-middle management and above tend to enjoy today.

Similarly, piles of paper documents and peripheral equipment were slowly replaced over the years by the desktop PC, itself superseded today by thin clients and laptops - connected to each other first by cable, then wirelessly. We are already seeing a wider range of mobile devices, capable of using an even more diverse smorgasbord of apps, linking up to this network.

The enterprise computing landscape is continuing to evolve. Most people are still working in one room, and on a keyboard at the same computer every day - but many organisations have introduced hotdesking and flexible working, with many more soon to follow in the hope of reducing their costs and increasing their agility.

Whatever the standard office looks like in 10 years or even 20, it will be more mobile, and might not even be a place.

The reasons for this shift are interconnected. Partly it is driven by technological changes that make it possible to devise new, perhaps better, certainly more efficient ways of working, and partly it is driven by an intense, overwhelming need to compete more effectively in an ever tougher, increasingly globalised market. Recent economic downturns have only exacerbated the situation.

Some resources have become much more affordable, such as compute and processing power; others - such as human labour and central-city real estate - have become much more expensive.

Ovum's recent series of Enterprise 2020 reports note that offices today connect employees using new social models and behaviours, harnessing portable higher-powered devices and location-aware, cloud-based applications. "Next-generation knowledge workers" increasingly choose from a wide range of resources - not all provided or stipulated by their employer organisation - when at work, wherever that might be on a day-to-day basis.

Kapil Raina, director of product marketing at security SaaS vendor Zscaler, notes that cloud will be key as well, and not just as an enabler of mobility. He says that market research firm Forrester's CIO forum indicated a belief that most IT services will be delivered from a cloud computing resource by the end of this decade.

"We have seen that the traditional perimeter is disappearing fast. This change creates enormous challenges for IT, which has to find a way to monitor and protect people across different devices in different locations all around the globe. IT can no longer dictate the platform the user chooses for internet access," Raina says.

He explains that the cloud will eventually be the primary route for enterprise users to access the internet with any device, anywhere they move to.

"On top of that transformational process, the level of threats out of the web has become so sophisticated nowadays that on-premise offerings can no longer react fast enough to keep up with the rapidly moving malware potential," he adds.

Facing future facts

Why should the channel care? Because VARs need to help firms keep up with these changes if they truly mean to benefit their customers.

As Ovum's principal analyst for consumer IT and integrated media, Richard Edwards, points out, workers are changing what they do and this affects the result of what they do. However, these "rogue" behaviours and approaches are not, on the whole, currently being supported by IT.

And IT should be doing so, or working towards doing so - because the pace of change is picking up. In just seven years, he says, the way we work will change more than in the previous 30.

"Business and IT managers should realise that the enterprise collaboration products and solutions selected in the next 18 months will determine how enterprises operate as they head though an uncertain decade towards 2020," he writes.

"Businesses that are able to move beyond rigid process models towards goal-driven outcomes have the opportunity to be truly customer- and market-reactive, fundamentally moving faster than the competition. In addition, organisations are now expected to be transparent, engage through social media, and be easy to do business with."

What should the channel actually do about all this? Edwards says that clearly VARs and other IT providers must ramp up their ability to act as trusted advisers, helping their customers along the largely untrodden path into the future.

The reality of change in the enterprise landscape must be communicated to customers, and the channel must help translate the vision into IT-based answers - many of which may involve elements of mobility, cloud, and social media.

VARs should find and develop skill sets in services and overall offerings that will foster sustainable returns in an environment of near-continuous change.

"Do not just do upgrades for XP or whatever, do something innovative instead. Look at virtualised desktop infrastructures (VDI), look at commiting to tablet devices, and perhaps choose a new player in the operating system market," Edwards suggests.

"Think about it. You have had a good relationship of 10, 15 or 20 years with Microsoft, but there are other players out there now. Realise that there will be a very diverse technology landscape in the future that will not necessarily be dominated by Microsoft, IBM and so on."

Appreciate also that the way ahead may not be clear, so interim offerings and solutions that offer part of what is wanted must be considered and promoted. Be prepared to act fast, and fail fast - which itself may lower the risk of failure.

Workers, he says, must be able to use the technology they want, when they want, and how they want. This goes beyond BYOD to bring your own app, or even bring your own data.

This risk must be managed, yes - but if you simply close down the possibilities, organisations will only drive the behaviour underground and still end up with problems.

Increasingly, the IT must support the knowledge worker, and do what he or she wants it to do, rather than the other way around - and in most cases, this person will be ambivalent about technology rather than the "power user" for whom vendors usually catered in the past. Whatever is offered, the benefit must be apparent to the technology-ambivalent user, according to Ovum's research.