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Added by Interface December 19, 2011

Interface Technical Training hosted a special SCCM: Planning, Deploying and Managing Microsoft ConfigMgr with MVP Greg Shields on November 14-18, 2011.

We sat down with Mr. Shields in a four-part interview to get his thoughts on various topics related to application management, virtualization, The Cloud, and System Center Configuration Manager.

In this video, Greg shares his insights on the new application management trends in The Cloud, VMWare, Vsphere5 and the impact that devices such as the iPad have on the IT industry.

Below is the transcription of the video.

So what are some of the exciting things that are going on in the industry? What do the cloud, VMware, vSphere 5 and other new developments mean for IT?

We’re at a point in IT where we’ve exited past the 1.0 version of IT. A lot of the foundational issues are getting stabilized – and we’re at the point where we understand how a lot of those fundamentals work.

Instead, a lot of technologies these days have to do with how the IT professional gets an “experience” delivered out to the user – whether it’s virtualization, RDS, XenApp of Cirtix technologies or any other technology. Today, we’re seeing a lot of technology that is based on delivering some sort of experience.

And really what we’re seeing a lot today are the first real vestiges of an actual application delivery infrastructure that finally allows people to get access to their apps and their data wherever they need. Regardless of the business you’re in, the foundation of IT is not important if you can’t deliver applications and data to users.

In many ways, this all started with the iPad. It’s kind of funny, but I see the iPad as being one of the most disruptive forces in IT today.

For a long time, large portions of the world were considered non-tech savvy. The notion of an application was something that would scare them.

The iPad brought this whole idea that a user can have a nice little device, touch two places, enter a password and, “wow,” there’s an application! When my wife got her iPad and installed an application, she said to me, “Has it always been this easy to install software? What in the world have you been doing the last 15 years?”

I had to explain that it’s taken a while for technologies to mature and get to this point. This isn’t necessarily driving users to have higher expectations of IT abilities, but it’s changing the relationship.

For a long time, we’ve focused on giving users what they need for just those tasks that we’ve determined are appropriate for them. But these applications have created this new world. You almost have to stop thinking about security as the first priority. Today, if I go to apply a lockdown, there’s six different things users can go to and bypass my lockdowns.

The whole notion of controlling the environment has been what’s fueled us for many years. But because of this application delivery realization, I see that as evolving into a different relationship – to work with users and provide them the access that they need.

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