Sam Routledge's Blog

Interesting concept here from Forrester – apparently HERO stands for Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives. These are your execs, your top sales guys – the people who work to drive your business forward and help you to change and to innovate. This reminds me of a conversation I had with our wonderful (if somewhat crazy!) chairman about being a ‘challenger’. Very interesting!

So, according to Forrester, these people are increasingly using Macs (and, I would presume, iPads etc) in a business context, because they are not constrained to the Windows desktop that they are provided by ‘corporate’. This is noteworthy as it is only three years since Forrester declared that Macs only had a niche place in business.

This has been a trend I have been following for a while – regular readers will know about my iPad addiction. When I attended the VMware Premier Partner Exec Council in January of this year, which encompassed the top 200 VMware partners worldwide, I was amazed at the number using iPads and MacBooks – and the small number using PCs.

I’ve been experimenting with the Bring Your Own Device/ PC concept within Softcat, and you know what? It works. The main reason for this was the fact that I was starting to embrace some of the social media concepts that were around, wanted to have access to those tools from whatever device – and also work (sadly!) from a variety of platforms in and out of hours. I guess I am not your typical employee, and hopefully I am a touch more technically literate than your average IT user, but you know what? This stuff works! I’ve had the luxury of access to both Citrix XenApp and VMware View, and of course we run Outlook Web Access and provide external access to SharePoint – the latter two being where I spend most of my time.

Not only does this stuff work, but it’s coming. There are plenty of technology solutions out there for device security, any-device access, application delivery – make sure you get ready for it!

(UPDATE)

This is not intended as anti-PC and certainly not anti-Windows – of course I am using Windows, but just via a remote connection. What I am saying is that I am ‘pro-choice’ – over the form factor, the access device, the (local) operating system. It’s anti-corporate conformity, not anti-Windows… It depends on what you want, and how you personally work more efficiently. One of our VMware techies runs Fedora as his native OS – apparently that works for him, but it’s a stage too far for me!

This entry was posted on October 27, 2011 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Desktops, Mobile devices, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.