Who controls IT? You!

Thirty years ago, Vinod Khosla and his cofounders at Sun Microsystems  proposed a daring mantra: 'The Network is the Computer'!  The power of computing  will soon lie, not on your desktop machine, but in the network that feeds it, they suggested. They were  dismissed as fools.

Now, finally,  they have been proved right, in ways they never imagined. Consider: what is a search  without Google?  What is an iPhone without the  App Store or  an Android phone without  Google Play?  When  many networks combine  to form a Cloud and we all have our heads right inside it!

Another trend is in play here: Virtualization.The Nexus tablets and laptops coming soon, are so 'thin' they have virtually no  storage or memory, they have to remain  permanently connected  to the Net where everything is stored.

VMWare is the Bhishma of  virtualization and last week at its annual tech mela in Mumbai,  Sanjay Mirchandani, Asia Pacific head of the company, signposted another radical development that  has implications for   the rest of us. The idea of offices allowing employees to bring the computing device of their choice – be it a laptop, an iPad, even a smartphone –  to perform their official duties, is a cost effective strategy  for companies who save the cost of supplying the PCs. It's called BYOD or Bring Your Own Device;  but getting the office software to work  in a  khijdi of devices, platforms, and operating systems  has  not been  easy.

The answer, says Mirchandani, is to tell  users: You bring any device: We'll  provide the  software to run on it -- any flavour you choose. "Most companies already have a mobile strategy in place. Now they need to go just one step further and add an ‘end user’ layer to their cloud  that ensures  full security no matter what the device".

It's called End User Computing and it's already being adopted by agile employers in India.  "Times have changed”, says Mirchandani, “The hardware – servers and PCs – no longer determine the IT operations of companies. It is the software that is navigating the IT ecosystem today.” The software, in this case, is the OS of your favourite computing device, which will soon double up as your office machine -- and yes, as your "time pass" platform as well.