Will iPads Trigger Christmas Hangover for CIOs & VARs?
Halloween hasn’t even arrived. In the U.S., the Thanksgiving holiday remains more than a month away. But here’s a potential nightmare before, er, after Christmas that VARs need to consider now: At McAfee Global Partner Day, executives openly wondered if CIOs and solutions providers will be ready to support millions of new iPads, iPhones and Google Android devices that consumers bring to work after the holidays.
Throughout the McAfee conference, held in Las Vegas, the security company focused on the consumerization of IT. No doubt, it’s a familiar theme: From social media (FaceBook and Twitter) to consumer devices (notebooks, netbooks, tablets, smart phones), CIOs are discovering that blocking consumer services and employee devices from the corporate network no longer is an option.
In fact, one McAfee executive mentioned a growing BYOPC trend — that is, Bring Your Own PC to work. McAfee claims a growing number of companies no longer buy PCs for their employees; instead, the companies give each employee a set budget to purchase their own systems. That sounds like a nightmare approach to The VAR Guy.
Ho, Ho, Horror
But there could be an even bigger nightmare awaiting CIOs once employees return from the 2010 Christmas holiday break. Specifically, McAfee expects CIOs and their channel partners to face a tidal wave of iPad support requests in early 2011 as consumers bring their shiny new iPads to work for the first time.
Instead of trying to block iPads and other mobile devices from corporate networks, McAfee is calling on partners to pitch mobile synchronization and mobile security services to iPad-toting customers.
The VAR Guy wonders: How many VARs and CIOs will heed McAfee’s advice before the post-holiday blues set in…
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Although the BYOPC trend might seem like a nightmare, it has at least two great benefits:
– Employees value their employer more for giving them the option to buy desktop/laptop hardware to better suit their personalities
– Employers do reduce their own admin overheads by not having to think about what workstations their employees really need (although this is somewhat offset again by increased technical support requirements)
We have had this scheme in place for the last 5 years or so in our 60 user IT company and it has worked very well.
Also, at many of our customers we are in any case seeing a plethora of devices entering the work-environment and it is inevitable that IT will have to support all of them at some stage in the future. This is then of course where desktop virtualisation as well as web based applications become key driving forces as that would make the underlying hardware and operating system almost irrelevant.
Hey Mark: The VAR Guy would welcome the opportunity to speak with you directly about the BYOPC trend. Our resident blogger is traveling the next few days but if you want to talk the week of Oct. 18, 2010, simply email TheVARguy [at] NineLivesMediaInc [dot] com.
-TVG