Back in November some of the ComputerWorld team attended the annual UKVMUG at the motor cycle museum in Birmingham, as ever it was a great mix of fantastic content, socialising and vendors displaying their wares.
Joe Baguley VP and CTO for VMware EMEA kicked off the mornings keynote with his unique presenting style summing up the current and future prospects for the IT industry with the use of a collection of animals to help emphasise the points. Below is my doodle from the keynote, you are also able to watch the recording from the keynote below as well.
I was also lucky enough to be able to catch up with Joe separately in the mezzanine area to discuss the present and future of IT within small to medium business, this led on well to my session at the UKVMUG, I was pleased to be asked to present a mezzanine slowly entitled the SMB business forum.
I was joined by a number of different IT professionals from a contractor for government organisations to an IT manager from a law firm and more. My discussion focused around the IT landscape today and how did we see this changing within the coming years. We were in agreement that IT was having to fundamentally change to work closely with the business and the users, to ensure we are able to deliver services that the users require to be as productive as possible and to ensure the business can stay competitive. One common subject was shadow IT with services such as Dropbox, the answer wasn’t to block users from using this service but enable them to use services installed, managed and maintained by IT such as AirWatch Secure Content Locker. We also spoke about the challenges of the cloud with many people participating raising issues with their businesses unable to put their company data in the cloud but looking to understand how they may achieve this in the future.
Once again it was a fantastic VMUG that I was proud to be able to take a small part in, a huge thanks to Jane, Alaric, Simon and Stuart for arranging once again. This was the last event for Jane, Alaric and Stuart as they are now stepping down from the steering committee, so a huge thank you from all the VMUG members for all your hard work.
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