“These days, it’s not about the assets. It’s about people, and it’s about the things they do,” recently said Brian Gammage, chief market technologist at VMware.
During VMworld Europe, Brian sat down with VMware TV to talk about how this shift in end-user computing (EUC) is transforming the entire IT organization. Watch it here, and read an excerpt from the interview below.
Q: You’ve been in this industry for quite a while. How have you seen things evolve from when you first started to where we are today?
Brian: It’s evolved massively. If we go back to when I started, it was all about devices. In fact, it was all about personal computers–getting them on desks in the first place, getting people equipped to do things they’ve been doing manually and automating processes. We went through a period of industrialization. Those processes could be managed because they were onerous, they were too heavy, but then of course the CapEx in those aged a lot more than it is these days, too. It was an asset-based world.
These days, it’s not about the assets. It’s about people, and it’s about the things they do. We completely shifted the focus of attention from being the thing to being the result, and that is massive.
Q: As companies have made this shift, so much has changed. How they have do maybe rethink the way they approach processes, rethink about how they approach CapEx and OpEx to embrace some of these projects. What are some of the challenges, and how are they moving into this world?
Brian: This is the change that most of our customers today are in the middle of. They are all infused with the digital workspace concept, the idea that their people, today everything they do is delivered in software. Every process they use is an application. They recognize that the future in terms of the workspace is digital, and yet, all the teams they have to operate, to manage, to procure the things that they use today are very much focused on devices, physical assets and platforms. They are trying to work out how to bring together different teams.
The desktop and the mobile world are still converging. In the eyes of the planner, of the buyer, they’re one because we work through tools. You and I, we use applications across a range of devices, but the reality is it’s still organized and operates as two teams within most organizations. They’re dealing with process change. They’re dealing with people change, which is never easy, and into the middle of that comes economics.
In the desktop world, best practice is 80% OpEx. For every 10 euros you spend, only 2 go on new things; 8 go to keeping the lights on for the things that you you’re using already. It’s a different world in mobile, and clearly the promise is bringing that lighter-weight, lower-OpEx management style across the desktop. But it’s not straightforward. The challenges our customers face are multi-fold. They are really about managing the change they know needs to happen. So it’s about what changes first and when does it change.
Q: One of the biggest catalysts for this convergence appears to be Windows 10. Talk about how organizations are using Windows 10 as a catalyst to bring them together and how are they approaching these two disparate teams merging together?
Brian: Windows 10 is probably the first sort of platform-based opportunity we’ve seen to accelerate that convergence process. Windows 10, of course, can be managed both through that traditional desktops and 80 percent OpEx style, but it can also be managed to them the lightweight enterprise mobility management (EMM) approach.
What organizations are planning to do is, as they turn over their desktop and laptop real estate (which tends to happen through attrition, they replace a percentage of them every year), there comes a point when they switch over the operating system they’re running from being whatever it was before, probably Windows 7, to Windows 10. As they make that switch, they can now put in place that parallel, lighter-weight management model and to begin to shift the management approach from being the previous generation to that next generation.
But again, it requires a degree of discipline, and the practical implication is that for at least the first two, maybe three years, you’re going to be running two processes in parallel. If you manage that well, that’s the opportunity to cross-pollinate skills, people learn from each other, and to actually manage to change in the most difficult thing of all, people.
Watch the rest of the interview to learn more about the challenges to converging the desktop and mobile worlds, and hear what Brian says is the most exciting trend he’s looking forward to in the future.
