It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, mainly as it’s been conference season which involves spending time away (usually in a foreign country), listening to vendor x, y, z, talk about their market perspective, and how their technology fits into the eco system of workplace technology (well, usually they talk about more than just workplace, but it’s what I pay most attention to :-) ).
Whilst it’s often perceived as a jolly, the days at such events are ordinarily long, mixed with a combination of vendor key messages, technology insights and details of technology improvements, and vendor meetings where we often talk about what we’ve done the past year with respect to them, and what we all think the opportunity is going to be for the following year.
For those of you internally, you’ll know that we’ve (CC) established ourselves as the leading service provider in the UK around Windows transformation, with our EMEA business equating to worldwide levels of prominence, numbers which frankly leave me very proud of what we’ve achieved over the last 15 years of improving and refining of our extensive service offerings to our customers.
It was actually this traction that lead to Citrix & Cisco asking us (well me) to present at the recent Citrix conference to extol the benefits of how we’ve deployed their integrated technology stacks to our customers, and how we’ve made such traction in a difficult market, (desktop virtualisation). We’re being used as the poster boy (for want of a better description), on how it can be done, and how it’s possible to provide cutting edge desktop transformation services that provide innovate solutions to business problems. Quite a vindication from these key vendors we felt, and why we agreed to do it.
This position in the market is allowing us to starting thinking about the future of workplace services, and for the last 6 months or so, I’ve been working on and considering the next generation of services and technologies, and how they’re going to impact us, our service offerings, and most importantly our customers.
The key vendors in this area are all thinking big, and are thinking cloud enablement (private and public) and this tricky integration and how it can reduce costs and provide better services for modern working environments.
In the next 12-18 months, it will be possible to build a true Desktop as a Service (DaaS) model, that critically will be able to flexible both up and down, and scale appropriately with need, (which the IT industry really can’t do right now). I fully anticipate however, it will probably be another 2-3 years before it’ll really be a viable option for our customer to consider buying and is thus part of our next generation of service development unlikely to gain any traction until after the Windows XP to 7 uplift.
I’m working with these vendors on helping them shape their products, to be more complete service offerings, (as the vendors are notorious on concentrating on technology features and functions over service integration considerations or really thinking about their customers business need and problems), and I’ll share more on these interesting developments in time when it becomes more appropriate to share this insight.
I’m off on Holiday from today for 2 weeks; recharge the batteries before the big push for the remainder of the year. I’ll pick up the blog when I return, as whilst I like technology and my job, even I like to put it down sometimes. :-)
