2014 - The Year of Change

As I have just finished up my company’s national kickoff that, concluded yesterday with MCPc's Game Changer, #GC14, event, 2014 is the year of change. Who would have believed that senior executives from the major players in the industry, Cisco, Citrix, VMware, NetApp, Dell, and HP, would come the Northeast Ohio in January for an expo let alone the 1000 customers that showed up in person and those that attended virtually? A real Game Changer right there!

DISCLAIMER - These are my words and views, as stated in my blog’s heading,  and do not reflect on my companies views.

In May of this year, it will mark my three year anniversary of leaving the corporate environment.  Choosing to leave the the enterprise was a needed change for me, I had grown stagnate. There were new technologies that I was able to design and build in the lab, get fully functional and then be told the famous saying ‘If its not broke, don’t fix it.’ I would put up the good fight and say that it will extend our capabilities and keep us in a supported platform, still a no go. Then the current software or platform would go end of life and it would be a scramble to do an ad hoc upgrade just to remain on a supported version or platform. I have experienced this multiple times. All this was caused by a fear of change.

The industry is changing all around us. It doesn’t matter what industry your talking about with mobility,  the need to reduce capital expenses, to support the next generations users, IT has to evolve to support the always on user anytime, anyplace and on any device. IT has to become agile.

Even us older IT people are always on. I am connected wherever I go, whether it is on my iPhone, iPad or Macbook Pro, yes I am a fan if you couldn’t tell :) This is not taking into account that I have always been a gamer, as is my whole family including my wife, so we all have gaming PCs along with consoles. The most important things is our internet connection. I have the highest available in my area at the moment, 50/5, but once it goes to 100/5, I will upgrade. We don’t even buy DVDs anymore, well physical ones, we just buy the movies off Vudu. I can watch them on any smart TV, internet device or even download them for offline viewing when I am on a plane or in the car for my sons. This is sure a change from the VHS vs Beta war that I witnessed while growing up and almost as game changing as when I got cable TV at age 11 in 1979.

Some analysts are saying that 2014 will be the year of Platform as a Service (PaaS), others say that 2014 is finally the year of VDI, I feel that it will be the year for organizations to start thinking about focusing on their primary line of business and quit worrying about IT and let someone else deal with it. Whether its on premise or off, having a Managed Service Provider (MSP) run the day to day IT business will allow an organization’s top people to focus on more strategic initiatives to drive the business forward instead of worrying about a patch window coming up this weekend.

I also see another change continuing to grow and that is use of Free Open Source Software in the enterprise. Whether that be more OSX, Android, iOS, Google Chrome books or even Moonshot servers in the corporate datacenter. I feel Hadoop will make into many organizations this year. I am still waiting to see HaaS - Hadoop as a Service pop up any day now.

As for me personally, I will be continuing my change that I started in 2012. While I will always be a Wintel/Citrix Architect, as that is the core factor of what I do,  I will continue to progress with a heavier focus  on my journey to become as proficient with Linux, Ruby and Chef as I am with Windows Server and Citrix technologies.

I want to leave you with a brief quote from the late great Ed Parker, Grand Master American Kenpo Karate ( the martial art I study), “A true martial artist is not one who fears change, but one who makes it happen.”

Now go forth and make 2014 your year of change.