Since 1974, Burger King has told you that you can “have it your way.” But since when has your company’s IT department told its employees that they can have it their way when it comes to their computing needs?
Back in the old days, employees showed up to work and were given the standard issue khaki-colored PC tower, monitor, keyboard and mouse – no ifs, ands, or buts. And most employees didn’t have a problem with this because they viewed their work computers as an instrument for getting the job done and not much else. In today’s world, however, IT departments have to deal with increasingly more frequent requests (and sometimes demands) from employees to incorporate their own hardware and software into the workplace. They want their sleek MacBook Pros, addictive iPhones, and ubiquitous online social networks, and they want to sync them together on their own terms and not be told what to do by IT as long as they get their jobs done.
This trend has been dubbed tech populism and represents the shift that we see occurring all around us in the 21st century economy: innovation driven by the demands of users, decentralization, and a more egalitarian access to resources. Now that we can run Windows on Apple hardware and multiple platforms on one Windows Machine, there is even more pressure on management to allow employees to bring their home computers to work or their work computers home.
The benefits of this type of arrangement are easy to spot – increased productivity and higher job satisfaction, to name a few – but as I write this I can imagine all of the readers who work in IT shaking their heads in unison. Heterogeneity in the computing workplace is never an easy thing for the professionals who strive to manage these resources.
Let’s say that you are an administrator of a medium-sized enterprise that has recently decided to allow Macs in the workplace. How do you plan on regulating security on employee-owned notebooks? What about managing your licensing and compliance needs? Can your systems management solution even recognize Macs, let alone allow for remote software deployment?
KACE is equipping IT organizations with the tools that they need to cope with tech populism. Application virtualization, cross-platform management and platform independent imaging and application deployment are all part of the KBOX Family of Systems Management Appliances. When it comes to quickly inventorying and managing heterogeneous environments in the workplace, managing licenses across different platforms and version numbers and even managing power utilization, there is no systems management solution that is as comprehensive, easy to use and affordable as KBOX.
If you have a few extra minutes, I would also highly recommend that you check out our CTO's webinar about the KBOX’s ability to manage tasks across platforms, or skim over a very relevant case study. Although systems management may never be quite as simple as choosing whether or not you want pickles on your Whopper, I can promise you that the KBOX will save you enough time finally be able to leave the office to go out and get one.
