Friday, January 21, 2011

The office desk phone is dead!

Hardwired office desk top phones, some costing several hundred dollars a piece, and a very lucrative business for the likes of Cisco, Avaya and others, are on their last legs.

They will follow the same path as landline phones have in residents, where already 25 percent of consumers in the US (and higher in some other countries) have abandoned them for the convenience of their mobile phones (it’s much higher then 25 percent in the younger age groups).

And those percentages are rapidly growing. Smart phone users find they get much more bang for their buck, and balk at paying two carrier fees for what they consider redundant services. And like most technologies of the past few years, what happens with consumers, generally gets implemented by businesses within a relatively short time.

So, within 2 to 3 years, I expect 25 to 35 percent of business users to employ a mobile smart phone device exclusively and abandon use of a fixed line desk phone. The impact to businesses will be significant as they embrace this mobile enabled mindset.

The result is that mobile devices will need to be enabled with many of the same productivity enhancing features of current fixed line desktop phones connected to feature-rich private branch exchanges (PBXes, or business-specific phone exchanges). Companies will be required to extend existing PBX/business phone functionality (e.g., extension dialing, call forwarding, internal routing) to a wide range of mobile devices. Vendors of business oriented smart devices, and business PBXes, will have to scramble to meet that need. But a significant portion of existing business PBXes are old and can’t easily be upgraded, nor are there universal standards to make cross-platform connectivity easy.

So who might be some of the winners and losers of this rapidly emerging trend?

Cisco stands to lose lots of desktop device business as a result. Cisco knows this, which is why it createdthe Cius tablet. It’s still too expensive for many users, and it’s not going to be the primary communications device like a smart phone, but it’s a step in the right direction. And Cisco competitor Avaya, with its A175 tablet and Flare interface, is moving in a similar direction.

Of course, Cisco and Avaya do have a significant stake in the back office IPBX (IP driven PBXes) market — where they should do very well by rolling out smart phone directed features (and partner with third-party solution providers).

On the device side, RIM bought a PBX extender company (Ascendent Systems) several years ago and turned it into an IPBX connected extension of its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) architecture, which turned intoits Mobile Voice System (MVS). It was ahead of its time when it was launched, but as more users choose to adopt only smartphones, this capability will grow in importance. Of course, MVS only works within the BES environment, so it’s not as valuable for mixed device environments, but this does give RIM a market advantage for BlackBerry environments.

Google offers Google Voice, which is cross-platform, but will ultimately be “tuned” for Android devices. Microsoft has Lync (formerly Office Communications Server), which it hopes will extend its dominant Exchange franchise into a unified communications powerhouse, but currently has limited mobile support. And IBM offers Connections and Sametime to enhance its suite of communications and social networking tools attractive primarily to the largest enterprises.

None of the above are direct replacements for the office phone/PBX today, but they are clearly pointed in that direction, unifying the voice and data features of the smart device world. And Cisco is not sitting still either, integrating a number of its acquisitions (e.g., WebEx) to enable mobile unified communications on its IPBX platforms. And there’s the wild card of what Apple might do in this space – partner or offer its own competing product to Google Talk.

Ultimately, it’s the user who stands to gain the most. And its companies who stand to feel the most pain in the next couple of years as they struggle to implement a strategy to make this happen within their existing telecomm/IT environment.

Short term costs will go up, as companies must purchase extensions to existing backend systems, or replace them altogether with newer generation products. Longer term however, the need for a single device which is always connected and always available to the user will enhance both that user’s productivity, and lower overall costs to the business by increasingly piggybacking on already existing connections and application (e.g., VoIP, email/messaging, presence, optimized routing, WiFi (free) calling, etc.).

Here’s the bottom line: few businesses have yet moved very far down this path. Its likely many will feel the heat from users in the next 6-12 months — especially the executive ranks that adopt newer technologies quickly and have the highest expectations. And as with in-demand devices like the iPhone and iPad, IT/telecom operations will likely be caught off guard and struggle to catch up.

Jack Gold is the founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, based in Northborough, Mass. He covers the many aspects of business and consumer computing and emerging technologies.

The office desk phone is dead! | VentureBeat

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Wyndham to franchise Dream and Night brands


Wyndham Hotel Group announced it has entered into an agreement with Chatwal Hotels & Resorts, gaining exclusive rights to franchise and manage its Dream and Night boutique hotel brands globally.
Dream and Night hotels currently are open in New York; Bangkok, Thailand; and Cochin, India. In addition, the 108-room, Dream South Beach is scheduled to open early this year in Miami Beach, adjacent to the former Versace Mansion on Collins Avenue.

The company also has announced plans to open a Dream hotel in New York’s Meatpacking District during the second quarter of this year and expand in South Asia.
Dream South Beach will be a '70s-inspired hotel, transforming two iconic properties, The Tudor Hotel and Palmer House into one ethereal property.
Dream South Beach
Michael Czysz’s design house Architropolisspearheaded the creative concept with Kelly Ogden helming the interiors, coupling a touch of disco with a French-Moroccan flare.

Dream's promenade is lined with wall fountains and the pathway glows with an acrylic, under-lit, in-laid floor, while an 8-foot tall sculpture of Ganesha, crafted by Miguel Rodriguez sits in a bamboo grove, guarding the entrance.

The former Palmer House lobby serves as Dream South Beach’s reception area, featuring original keystone wainscoting as well as a keystone front desk dating back to 1939, when the original facade was erected.

All public areas in the renovated hotel feature custom-crafted lighting and furniture, echoing the surreal scene of the 108 guestrooms, including the Sun House Duplex Penthouse, two Duplex Sun Suites, and nine Junior Suites.

Guests will discover a sleek, jewel-box feel in the bedrooms, boasting carved neo-French-Moroccan doors back-lit by cool blue light. In fact, the rooms are cast almost entirely in shades of teal, cobalt and purple while flickering prisms flank the bed and a white and whimsical chandelier dangles above.

As a nod to the past, Dream's new restaurant, The Tudor, occupies the ground floor of what was The Tudor hotel serving up casual, contemporary American fare. The venue features baseball-stitched banquette seating and back-lit teak screen partitions, while the outdoor dining areas are furnished with custom teak bench seating and dining tables with bronze glass tops amid a background of tropical plants.
The new rooftop lounge, also steeped in late '70s decor—with glimmering glass tiles in white and gold and of course, loads of lucite—will offer an infinity pool and sun-soaked views of the Atlantic ocean.
“These design-driven, destination-within-a-destination brands are favored by travelers who crave an avant-garde yet cosmopolitan experience,"  said Eric Danziger, Wyndham Hotel Group president and chief executive officer. " We are especially proud to work with Sant Singh Chatwal, an innovative hotelier and entrepreneur, to expand and evolve these brands in key business and leisure markets around the globe.”
The Night brand, which Wyndham plans to develop in primary and secondary markets, will be positioned as an ‘affordably chic’ hotel option featuring innovative designs and services such as guest deejays in lounges, discounts for green motorists with hybrid and electric cars and gourmet quick-serve food and beverage options.
Developers will be able to adapt the product to both full-service and limited-service models that offer a ground floor ‘living area’ with an attractive space for social interaction. The model also can be adapted to existing exterior-corridor hotels in prime locations.
The Dream brand is positioned as a full-service, lifestyle brand for gateway cities and resort destinations. The brand’s personality is light-hearted and fun, embracing the use of vivid visuals and trend-setting design. The progressive service offerings will emulate those of luxury hotels, but with a more relaxed point of view.
Dream and Night locations presently include the 216-room Dream New York at 210 W. 55th St. in midtown Manhattan; the 72-room urban Night Hotel at 132 W. 45th St. in Manhattan; the 195-room Dream Hotel Bangkok in the heart of Thailand’s capital city; and the 151-room Dream Cochin, located in Ernakulum City, the commercial capital of Kerala, India.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Why Any Serious Internet Entrepreneur Is On Quora

In the world of entrepreneurship one of the most important forms of currency is information. If you aren’t on Quora, you probably don’t have that currency.

Listening To Customers

iterateOne of the hottest topics in Silicon Valley nowadays is the “Lean Startup Model”, a model in which quick iterations are superior to theoretically long, drawn out releases which have a significant potential of failure. The position of Lean Startup Model evangelists is a legitimate one: if you don’t listen to your customers then you are pretty much destined to fail because customers tell you what they want. To many of those individuals I would suggest that their single landing page site which is used to test an idea is often times completely misleading. One case and point comes from a story told on Quora by Michael Flaxman in response to the question “What is the best way to test an internet startup idea?”:

Unfortunately, the most reliable way to find out is to build the minimum viable product and see how people respond to it.

The idea that you can scientifically determine whether or not a startup will work is a nice thought, but I think it’s unrealistic. If there were reliable tests you could take before launching a startup, wouldn’t startups fail at an exceptionally low rate?

I have a developer friend who wanted to build a cheaper email marketing software, but he didn’t want to make the investment in building a product only to find that it couldn’t make money. So, he found some of his competitors’ clients and asked them if they’d switch. When that seemed promising he setup a landing page that looked like it was for real email marketing software, only the software wasn’t yet built. He then bought traffic and carefully measured how expensive it was to get a “signup” on his landing page. Looking good so far. 6 months of building a clone product and he was ready to get it to some of those trial users.

Unfortunately, his users had lots of reasons why they now wouldn’t actually leave their current SaaS product and switch to his cheaper one. 6 more months of fixing bugs and adding features — including one that let you 1-click copy your account from one of his major competitors into his software — and the project had flopped. It turns out getting people to say yes to “are you interested in a better/cheaper product?” is much easier than getting them to actually make the change (and pay money for it).

Ouch! Take that lean startup people! Listening to the customer is definitely important to some extent, however I would suggest that customers don’t know what they want. That doesn’t mean that all hope should be lost though. That’s because there’s a much better indicator of what to build: the market.

Listening To The Market

While the customer doesn’t necessarily know what they want, the market is a very effective gauge of it. Successful companies are those who build products that resonate with their customers. Those customers in turn tell others about the product and eventually the product reaches a significant number of customers. So how on earth do you monitor the market? Read the news, extensively research the market, and most importantly (if you are in the Internet industry): read Quora! I have a quick story to illustrate the point of this.

I have an entrepreneur friend who is constantly asking me for advice and asking for help on raising funding. My single greatest complaint isn’t about his business (e.g. that it’s a bad idea … which it isn’t), but instead that he has no idea who the other players are in the market. How can you truly become a seriously player in a market that you are completely oblivious to? The answer: you can’t. There are tons of companies who are out there doing the research for you to find out what the market wants.

Unless you are a first mover, which is most often not the case, there is no excuse for not knowing who’s in your market, what they’re doing, and what works for them and what isn’t working. The bottom line: if entrepreneurship were a chess game, no chess player makes their moves without taking into consideration the other player’s moves. So pay attention to the market!

Quora As A Place To Gain Insight

While Quora is by no means the beat of the marketplace, there is plenty of insight to be gleaned from people who post on the site. There are great responses posted about many of the toughest challenges facing entrepreneurs. Clearly, if you spend too much time on the site you are doing yourself a disservice. Additionally, not all players in the marketplace are exactly transparent about their intentions, so the deepest insight comes from those who are sharing the moves they made weeks, months, or most often, years ago.

These anecdotes can prove to be extremely valuable. Business anecdotes are one of the reasons that incubators like YCombinator have become so successful. Aside from providing money, they provide unfiltered insight from business leaders in the community. While much of the information on Quora is clearly filtered (often times so much that it’s clear the person responding has intentionally left out chunks of a story), there are plenty of great insights to be gleaned from reading the site. Do you agree that Quora has become a critical resource for any serious internet entrepreneur? Do you use the site regularly?

Why Any Serious Internet Entrepreneur Is On Quora

Why Any Serious Internet Entrepreneur Is On Quora

In the world of entrepreneurship one of the most important forms of currency is information. If you aren’t on Quora, you probably don’t have that currency.

Listening To Customers

iterateOne of the hottest topics in Silicon Valley nowadays is the “Lean Startup Model”, a model in which quick iterations are superior to theoretically long, drawn out releases which have a significant potential of failure. The position of Lean Startup Model evangelists is a legitimate one: if you don’t listen to your customers then you are pretty much destined to fail because customers tell you what they want. To many of those individuals I would suggest that their single landing page site which is used to test an idea is often times completely misleading. One case and point comes from a story told on Quora by Michael Flaxman in response to the question “What is the best way to test an internet startup idea?”:

Unfortunately, the most reliable way to find out is to build the minimum viable product and see how people respond to it.

The idea that you can scientifically determine whether or not a startup will work is a nice thought, but I think it’s unrealistic. If there were reliable tests you could take before launching a startup, wouldn’t startups fail at an exceptionally low rate?

I have a developer friend who wanted to build a cheaper email marketing software, but he didn’t want to make the investment in building a product only to find that it couldn’t make money. So, he found some of his competitors’ clients and asked them if they’d switch. When that seemed promising he setup a landing page that looked like it was for real email marketing software, only the software wasn’t yet built. He then bought traffic and carefully measured how expensive it was to get a “signup” on his landing page. Looking good so far. 6 months of building a clone product and he was ready to get it to some of those trial users.

Unfortunately, his users had lots of reasons why they now wouldn’t actually leave their current SaaS product and switch to his cheaper one. 6 more months of fixing bugs and adding features — including one that let you 1-click copy your account from one of his major competitors into his software — and the project had flopped. It turns out getting people to say yes to “are you interested in a better/cheaper product?” is much easier than getting them to actually make the change (and pay money for it).

Ouch! Take that lean startup people! Listening to the customer is definitely important to some extent, however I would suggest that customers don’t know what they want. That doesn’t mean that all hope should be lost though. That’s because there’s a much better indicator of what to build: the market.

Listening To The Market

While the customer doesn’t necessarily know what they want, the market is a very effective gauge of it. Successful companies are those who build products that resonate with their customers. Those customers in turn tell others about the product and eventually the product reaches a significant number of customers. So how on earth do you monitor the market? Read the news, extensively research the market, and most importantly (if you are in the Internet industry): read Quora! I have a quick story to illustrate the point of this.

I have an entrepreneur friend who is constantly asking me for advice and asking for help on raising funding. My single greatest complaint isn’t about his business (e.g. that it’s a bad idea … which it isn’t), but instead that he has no idea who the other players are in the market. How can you truly become a seriously player in a market that you are completely oblivious to? The answer: you can’t. There are tons of companies who are out there doing the research for you to find out what the market wants.

Unless you are a first mover, which is most often not the case, there is no excuse for not knowing who’s in your market, what they’re doing, and what works for them and what isn’t working. The bottom line: if entrepreneurship were a chess game, no chess player makes their moves without taking into consideration the other player’s moves. So pay attention to the market!

Quora As A Place To Gain Insight

While Quora is by no means the beat of the marketplace, there is plenty of insight to be gleaned from people who post on the site. There are great responses posted about many of the toughest challenges facing entrepreneurs. Clearly, if you spend too much time on the site you are doing yourself a disservice. Additionally, not all players in the marketplace are exactly transparent about their intentions, so the deepest insight comes from those who are sharing the moves they made weeks, months, or most often, years ago.

These anecdotes can prove to be extremely valuable. Business anecdotes are one of the reasons that incubators like YCombinator have become so successful. Aside from providing money, they provide unfiltered insight from business leaders in the community. While much of the information on Quora is clearly filtered (often times so much that it’s clear the person responding has intentionally left out chunks of a story), there are plenty of great insights to be gleaned from reading the site. Do you agree that Quora has become a critical resource for any serious internet entrepreneur? Do you use the site regularly?

Why Any Serious Internet Entrepreneur Is On Quora

5 BIG Themes in Business Intelligence for 2011


There is nothing like a record snowfall (here in NJ, where I live) and a new year to reflect on the hot topics in BI for 2011. Here is my list of the five most important trends for the year ahead.

1. Advanced Visualization and Dashboards Go Mainstream

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Marketbright provides on-demand marketing automation to help non-technical users run Web sites and more. Vindicia offers an e-billing product that runs as a service, manages recurring billing and offers fraud management Spiceworks agentless, ad-supported management tool runs right in the browser, targeted at the small to medium sized business.
Marketbright provides on-demand marketing automation to help non-technical users run Web sites and more.

Last year, QlikTech went public, Tableau Software revamped its product, and IBM Cognos released its second-generation dashboard solution, dubbed "Business Insight." Advanced visualization and discovery tools continue to garner significant interest because of their ease of use, visual appeal, and ability to speed the time to insight amid vast amounts of data.

The challenge for companies is in understanding when technologies overlap and the degree to which they are converging. Should you look for these capabilities from your BI platform vendor or from a specialty vendor?

Discover the capabilities that outsourced managed services brings to your business, and how Software as a Service helps businesses comply with regulations and industry standards

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For dashboards, the answer depends on your BI platform. Vendors such as Oracle and MicroStrategy have the most robust, appealing, and integrated dashboard solutions (feel free to disagree with me here, but as always, my conclusions are from hands-on testing of hundreds of criteria). This is not to say that other vendors haven't made strides in their latest releases, but these two vendors are furthest along.

If, however, you are looking for an advanced visualization product with dashboard capabilities, the better products remain with specialty vendors. A few of the leading BI platform vendors have some exciting products in development in this area.

Beyond these tools, businesses will continue to struggle to decide who owns them and who should develop related content: business or IT? First attempts at developing dashboards tend to look like glitzy pin ball machines, but as people gain experience and expertise, these tools become the most useful component of BI.

2. Mobile BI Gets Recharged

Mobile BI didn't even make my top trends last year, so one could say its appearance this year is quite a leap. In the cool BI class I teach at TDWI events, this innovation rarely gets top nod from attendees. However, few could have foreseen the wild adoption of Apple's iPad. The wider screen real estate and sheer beauty that this tablet brings to BI is reason to take stock of your mobile BI strategy.

What devices will you support, and what is your vendor's strategy? Vendor capabilities here remind me of my living room on New Year's Eve morning: unclear, fragmented, and all over the place. Support for devices, content, consumer ability, and native-versus-browser support vary widely.

MicroStrategy's mobile BI solution is the broadest and most robust, including support for iPhone/iPad as well as Blackberrys. QlikTech and Actuate also are further ahead than some of the larger platform vendors. Niche vendor RoamBI, which supports content from multiple BI vendors, is worth investigating.

Companies that fail to consider mobile BI's potential and limitations will be forced into reactionary mode; when you scramble to pull together a strategy, you risk security breaches, mixed devices, and inconsistent support.

3. Facebook Gives BI More Than a Facelift

Facebook hit 500 million users mid 2010, a community now larger than the population of the U.S. and Canada combined. It's changing the way a generation interacts, lobbies, advertises, complains, and thinks. It's impossible for this trend not to impact BI. Social networking brings new data sources for analysis. It also brings new demands for how users respond to insights from data, and that is never in isolation.

To date, a report may be viewed as part of a task or decision-making process. Any discussion around the report is typically offline. Key decisions from the insight are made verbally or shared via e-mail or in documents, sometimes held in a document management system.

Envision a Facebook influence on BI: decision-makers bring together the right people virtually; users themselves control the flow and content instead of a central IT group who secures the data and subsequent analyses. Tasks, comments, opinions, and even new sets of data and analyses are brought together seamlessly.

Sounds too futuristic? Some vendors have already offered annotations to BI content, such as Information Builders Performance Management Framework and Dundas Dashboards. Moving far beyond just a portal technology, consider the new BI-integrated collaboration capabilities built into Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Beyond SharePoint, Outlook 2007 has collaboration features that SAS has been quick to leverage. Demonstrating further social networking's influence, last year SAP launched StreamWork (but without BI content), Oracle BI Enterprise Edition 11g included support for Web Center (someone should rename this product!), and IBM Cognos 10 shipped with Lotus Connection. So the BI heavy weights are making inroads, but niche vendor Lyzasoft seems to have gotten the "user-directed" aspect most right.

So we've seen some innovation here, but the convergence of social networking with BI is still very young.

4. Economic Recovery Stretches BI Teams

The economy shows signs of recovering. Companies that weren't using BI to work smarter are no longer with us. BI budgets are once again expanding. The challenge is to continue to spend wisely, but also, to keep up with insatiable user demand. Central BI can't handle it all.

More Software Insights

White Papers

Reports

Videos

Marketbright provides on-demand marketing automation to help non-technical users run Web sites and more. Vindicia offers an e-billing product that runs as a service, manages recurring billing and offers fraud management Spiceworks agentless, ad-supported management tool runs right in the browser, targeted at the small to medium sized business.
Marketbright provides on-demand marketing automation to help non-technical users run Web sites and more.

Bringing BI to the masses also means balancing what to handle centrally and enterprise-wide, and when to let users do their own thing. It's not always a matter of departmental BI being a throw-away or stand-alone application. Sometimes it's a matter of intelligently separating responsibilities. SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 has an interesting approach to metadata development that supports such an approach. eThority also seems to nicely blend enterprise class with departmental control.

If a shrinking economy helped spur open source adoption, what will a recovering economy do? I would argue that open source BI is not growing primarily because it's free; it's growing because it's open, allowing for easier embedability. Such aspects are more important to ISVs and others who build industry-focused applications, which in itself is a sizable market.

Learn how to start the process and gain insight into the best practices that will ensure a smooth transition

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For open source to compete more squarely with commercial BI, the products must continue to improve; some are strong in one or two core areas, but not across the BI spectrum. Beyond the U.S. market, open source BI is also attractive to governments and foreign companies that don't want such critical assets to be powered entirely by U.S.-based software makers.

5. Will New Releases Bring Upgrade Fever or Flu?

Major new software releases mean powerful new capabilities, as long as the upgrade process is seamless. Painful migrations can leave IT resources strained with testing, bug resolution, and redesign.

The top-four BI vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP) all had major new product releases in 2010. Customers who have been burned with painful migrations in the past will not rush to adopt the latest versions. In some cases, 2011 will be a time to assess the cost of upgrading versus the cost of switching preferred vendors.

It has been interesting to see how both IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects have a "co-existence" strategy in their latest releases: leave old content as is, running on the new platform. That approach is fine as a transition strategy; but the proof point will be in how easy and quick it can be to shut down previous versions and move reports and metadata layers into the upgraded software.

In-Memory and More

So what about all the other things I wrote about last year: in-memory, cloud, BI for SMBs, culture, and predictive analytics?

All these areas continue to be critical, and I continue to be both impressed and overwhelmed by the degree of innovation and success from smaller vendors in the BI space. My five picks above are the things that I think will garner the most attention, generate the most activity, and cause the most disruption in 2011.

If I added a sixth item, it would be continued growth of in-memory analytics. In-memory proved to be one of the biggest BI technology themes in 2010 (think Microsoft's PowerPivot and SAP's HANA). It will be a capability that many companies will implement this year, whether as part of visual discovery and dashboards (item 1), insatiable user demand (item 4), or instantaneous response time that mobile requires (item 2). It seems, though, that while in-memory is a cornerstone to some vendors' BI strategy, others are more reticent. Will vendors like Oracle continue to have a wait- and-see approach, or will they advocate greater focus on other technologies for fast, big data BI such as appliances, indexing, various caching, and columnar databases?

As I look at last year's take on the year ahead, my BI predictions seemed fairly accurate. And with the Packers winning not one but two of their playoff games so far, perhaps my accuracy is finally carrying over to football! I hope it's a good omen for next weekend!

Happy New Year!

Cindi Howson is the founder of BI Scorecard, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.

Dark Reading has published an in-depth report on eliminating vulnerabilities in enterprise software. Download it now (free registration required).

5 Big Themes in BI for 2011 -- Information Week | Business Intelligence -- InformationWeek

Using Smartphone Technology to Power Your Enterprise

The Motorola showcase of the Atrix 4G a few weeks ago at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas is a huge step in the right direction for desktop virtualization. For the past 18 months, I have been speaking publicly about desktop virtualization, and at every conference I keep stressing the inevitability of the smartphone making a significant impact on desktop virtualization.

If we break down the components of a smartphone today, we end up with a mini-computer. If I have that much power in the palm of my hand, why can’t I use it to power other devices? Why can’t I use it as a thin client? Except, the smartphone has an advantage over traditional thin clients, it has a 3G or 4G signal which means it has built-in internet access. Now if I have Internet access anywhere I go, I can access my DVI (Desktop Virtualization Infrastructure) desktop from anywhere, anytime. Now that is cool. However, let’s take it one step further, instead of the concept of Bring Your Own PC (BYOP), let’s keep the same acronyms but say Bring Your Own Phone. Now organizations can spend money to purchase these smartphones and have docking stations at desks that extend them to monitors and keyboards. Connect them to Wi-Fi at work. Do we really need to be wired to the desktop? No, that saves on switching infrastructure and cabling and much more while investing more in wireless access points.

The Motorola Atrix 4G is a huge step in the right direction for DVI enthusiasts and the fact that Citrix supports the device with the Citrix Receiver reinforces its advanced position in this market. Organizations are on the verge of a Windows 7 upgrade and a hardware refresh on desktops as well. Some are even on the verge of a mobile phone upgrade for users. A pretty large undertaking. What if they change their way of thinking a bit and instead of refreshing everything, refresh the phones with the Atrix or the likes of Atrix? The peripherals like keyboard, mouse and monitor should be pre-existent – all you have to do is build an infrastructure that can support DVI and the question of off-line access has solved itself.

Instead of finding a way to enable users to work offline, we found a way to keep users online with fewer devices and no complex setups. Sure, one can argue that on a plane, we still don’t have signal, but one can also argue that more and more planes have Wi-Fi nd it is just a matter of time before it becomes standard. Let’s face it: we live in a connected world, let’s change our way of thought and move forward, being off-line is not an option anymore. While that may have been the case 10 years ago, it is not today. Today, if you are not connected, you are not productive.

The Atrix is just the beginning, the next step will be to create shells for the phone, for example, why should I buy an iPad? Why can’t I just buy a shell that looks like the iPad and slide my iPhone in it to light up all the features of an iPad? Why can’t I get into my car, slide my phone in and that lights up my navigation and everything else I get from my in-car entertainment system today?

Tablets are not the future, you know what is? Smartphones.

Using Smartphone Technology to Power Your Enterprise


Go Droid Go!