2013 IT Priorities

UCaaS Business Suite Market Share

Here is the ink to the article:

http://www.srgresearch.com/articles/8x8-leading-high-growth-cloud-ucaas-market

 

Working from Home

I have always been a believer in working from the office!  When I started Nortec 23 years ago and it was just me, I rented a small office and did not work from home.  I may be one of few entrepreneurs to do this but I always enjoyed the separation and for me it is stress management as well.  Now I am like everyone else in the information age doing emails from home and carrying my mobile phone pretty much all the time.  I work at home on nights and weekends sometimes but I do try to keep this to a minimum and focus on family and down time. 

So I like to work from my office but does that mean it is the right approach for others.  The approach we take at Nortec is that for the consultants and sales we are flexible once they have been with the organization for a while.  Everyone must come in at the beginning until they are integrated and hitting their metrics.   I encourage everyone to continue to work from the office as often as possible as it does help connect everyone with the occasional impromptu meeting.  Of course these kind of meetings can be time sinks as well so it is a double edged sword.  If someone is delivering top numbers in sales or top consultant in the field there is tremendous latitude.    Overall my philosophy leans toward the showing up at the office.

Related Article:

The New York Sunday Times “Location, Location, Location”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/working-from-home-vs-the-office.html

Accelerating Performance Through Flawless Execution - Matt "Whiz" Buckley

I attended “Accelerating Performance Through Flawless Execution” presentation by Matt “Whiz” Buckley with Afterburner, Inc.  Matt was a US Navy Hornet Pilot who quickly acknowledged that you will not attain flawless execution but strive toward this end.  It is easy to see the need for great execution when flying a multimillion dollar supersonic aircraft. 

The planning is probably the most important phase and Matt describes creating three groups.  Each group is tasked to come up with a plan and one of these groups is designated to be the “out of box” group meaning they create a plan with no resource limitations.  This allows the third group to be more creative and may come up with something that is implemented.  The three groups would come together to create the actual plan from the three plans.  Once the plan is vetted a fourth group would “Red Team It” - they would not have been part of the plan but would listen to the plan and criticize it by looking for holes.  In this step it is important for the initial three groups who created the plan to just listen to the feedback and not argue.  They need to just say thanks and record the information.  Once the Red Team has left they would scrutinize the feedback and use it when it makes sense.

The other area I liked that Matt discussed was the de-brief meeting.  The importance of getting everyone together after the mission and reviewing what went right and what went wrong.  This step is all too often skipped.  The ground rules for the de-brief are:

1.      "It's not who is right, it is what is right"
2.      Everyone is an equal in the de-brief meeting
3.      What is said in the room stays in the room – except of course lessons for the future

 Afterburner Website Link:

http://www.afterburnerseminars.com/

Server Market Share

The Server Market is still dominated by IBM, HP and Dell with combined market share of 74%.  However, there are several newer players in the "Other Vendors" category that are designing high density data center specific servers.  The traditional vendors do not always dominate the new space and new vendors often emerge when there is a significant shift in the market.  The shift to the cloud is causing changes everywhere and the big winners still remain to be seen.

Server Market Share

IBM                                      35%
HP                                        25%
Dell                                      14%
Oracle                                   4%
Fujitsu                                   4%
Other Vendors                   18%

Source:  Data Center Knowledge: “Gartner, IDC See Server Sales Turning a Corner” by  Jason Verge

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/03/01/gartner-idc/

Installing Office 365 ProPlus for Office 365 pre-upgrade tenants

Office 365 ProPlus, the new version of the Office desktop apps Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and more, is available today for existing Office 365 customers. A user must have an existing Office Professional Plus license assigned to them in order to use the new Office.

Our demo user here, Bob Kelly, has a check-mark in the Office Professional Plus license. This means he will be able to sign-in with the new Office 365 ProPlus and activate it against his service.
We set up our Office Licensing Service so that any user who has been assigned a subscription license to Office Professional Plus has a license to the new version of Office, Office 365 ProPlus. It doesn’t matter whether your tenant has received the service upgrade or not. This includes Office for Mac 2011 for Office 365.
The second step is installing Office 365 ProPlus. If your tenant hasn’t been upgraded yet, you won’t have access to the installer from the Microsoft Online Portal. Instead, you will need to either install Office 365 ProPlus from a Trial account, either a Midsize Business Trial, or an Enterprise E3 Trial, or use the Office Deployment Tool. If you install from a Trial account, you will sign-in by using your organizational account when you first run Office 365 ProPlus after the installation. This essentially deactivates the trial on the computer and reactivates Office 365 ProPlus in your production tenant.

You have two main options:
Installing Office 365 ProPlus from a trial account:
This is the least technical way to install Office 365 ProPlus but require more steps and clicks, best for a business user or small business without IT help. You will create a throw-away id to sign up for the trial. After the installation, you sign in to Office 365 ProPlus by using your organizational account. Be sure to follow the instructions step by step.
Installing Office 365 ProPlus using downloaded source files:
This way requires working with config.xml in NotePad and command-line tools, but has fewer steps and can also provide more flexibility for an IT professional who wants to have the Office 365 ProPlus source files to install Office on multiple machines through a network share or other software distribution system. See Installing Office 365 ProPlus using downloaded source files.

Source: Microsoft

Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview

I watched “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview” on Netflix.  It is an interview done in 1995 but not released until 2012 as it was apparently lost.  The interview is very good and insightful to the IT industry and specifically Steve Jobs thoughts at that time.  I found one statement particularly interesting.  Steve Jobs talked about the difference between average and the best in most industries is 20%, 30% or maybe 50% better.  As an example, the best taxi in New York vs average he explains is maybe 30% better.   Steve Jobs believes that the difference between an average IT professional and the best is 50 times greater.  Getting the absolute best technical professionals was significant in the creation of the Mac.  Steve Jobs also points out that top professionals working with other very top professionals creates an interesting dynamic where the team excels even more.  These experts may not have had the opportunity to work with the best in the past.  They really enjoy it and take themselves to the next level.  In the systems integration business, I do not think that the difference between the best and average is 50 times but it would be 2 to 3 times or more and this creates a significant advantage to an organization that is able to attract these top professionals. 

2013 IT Spending Growth

 IDC is projecting U.S. IT spending to grow by 6% and Forrester is projecting 6.5%.  Forrester reduced their projection from 7.5% because of the sequester.  This is modest growth but it is greater than the overall GDP growth and considering the focus on reducing costs this is encouraging for the IT industry.  The priorities of the spending according to a Protiviti survey are:

1.      Mobile Commerce

2.      Management and Classification of Data

3.      Social Media

4.      Business Continuity

5.      Risk Management

6.      IT Infrastructure Planning

7.      IT Asset Management

Mobility is clearly a priority for everyone as mobile devices become so much more powerful.  The cloud is not listed but is often the technology utilized to support these IT priorities.  This is the way it must be as it does not make sense to move to the cloud because it is a trend it needs to be done as a compelling method to deliver business continuity, risk management, mobile commerce etc.

Source:  “IDC says tech spending will grow by 6% this year, the same rate as 2012”  by By Patrick Thibodeau, COMPUTERWORLD UK    http://tinyurl.com/aoce2ds

Source: Protiviti 2013 IT Priorities Survey  http://www.protiviti.com/itsurvey