Live from Citrix Synergy

For the last several years we have been hearing about consumerization of IT, mobility and cloud.  While attending Citrix Synergy 2012, these are all terms that continue to be echoed.  These terms seem to be defined and interpreted in different ways but for those of us in IT (as well as those who are not), it is clear that things are changing.  I'm going to try and break these down and at least provide my interpretation.

Most recently we have seen vendors and implementers of IT state that they are driving towards "any user, any device".  This is due to a trend which is referred to as BYOD (bring your own device).  From an IT support perspective, I interpreted this to mean computers and tablets.  What we are actually seeing is that while there are some people want to bring their laptops into the workplace, this is mostly referring to smartphones and tablets.  This is what we are seeing in our organization.  The number of personally owned devices now exceeds the number of corporate devices that we manage.  At the Synergy conference the "any" slogan has been expanded to "any user, any device and any app".  Citrix specifically is moving away from different receiver applications towards "One Receiver" and making the user experience much more positive. 

Cloud is another service which is heavily being spoken about as it has in this and other conferences for the last two years.  However, this is the first year that we are actually seeing some definitive products and strategies around "cloud".  We have been hearing a lot about "cloud" but it wasn't until this week that I have seen a proper definition.  NIST has a very clear definition of cloud which can be found on their website at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf.  After seeing some of the products announced this week, I believe that the next 6 to 12 months are going to be a defining point in the computer era for the years to come.  One speaker made the parallel to when the first IBM PC was introduced.  While in the past I have been skeptical, what I have seen this week makes me a true believer.