Virtual Report
How to adjust to disruption
I’ve stated this before: in this disruptive world, with its tsunami of new technology rolling our way, it’s very important to adjust our choices and business models in a much shorter period of time than we’re used to. This presents us with two major challenges: keeping the knowledge of our consultants at a consistently high level and determining which market innovations are suited for solutions we can present to our clients.
Knowlegde
Keeping knowledge at a high peak and up to date starts with making clear choices: what to do and what NOT to do. This focus gives us the drive to become the best-in-class. Besides focus, we invest in knowledge of all our employees. We encourage them to be active in the community, have them working on practices, organize consultant vs. client meetings, invite them to go to seminars and offer them the right trainings. But first and foremost: we offer them time to do so. A consultant nowadays cannot keep up with current developments by putting in a few weeks of training and investing private time at night. Besides challenging and innovative projects, they need time to gain knowledge, write blogs and do a lot of hands-on experience; we accommodate this on an individual level.
Solutions
The other challenge involves our clients: not all new ‘tsunami technology’ is suited for them, but what is? To determine whether and how new technologies can benefit our clients, we established an Innovation Board. The Innovation Board is a selected group of consultants supported by project managers, board members and sales & marketing to discuss our practices, lessons learned, future technical possibilities and the road ahead. They also learn and adopt new technologies and develop new approaches. Additionally, they train our colleagues and communicate to assure the best knowledge and solutions are brought to our customers. People and processes play an important role in this.
Where to start
The challenges we’re facing at ITQ often also exist among our clients. Certain solutions will result in more revenue, but time, knowledge and experience to investigate and implement them are sometimes lacking. To offer clients a fast and low profile way to get acquainted with new innovations, we’ve developed accelerators. An accelerator encompasses a pre-production environment which shows the potential of new technology and is set up by a combined effort between ITQ and a client(-team). The environment can be on- or offsite and is completed within an agreed period of time. Managers, end users and administrators can experience the new technology hands-on in this environment and receive an early on-the-job training, thus determining whether it can be beneficial to their business needs. Want to read more about our accelerators? A number of them can be found online. If your solution/product isn’t there, feel free to contact us.
If you’re a frequent reader of this newsletter, you will hopefully have noticed by now I’m very interested in how technology can benefit our clients. If you want to exchange ideas with me (non commercial!), don’t hesitate to send me an email: these talks give me energy and I will gladly pay you a visit.
Enjoy reading,
Francisco Perez van der Oord
Accelerate
You want to get your infrastructure to the next level, but you or your organization are cautious to invest in new solutions. And rightly so. Get started in a fast and low profile way to get acqainted with the potential of a new technology in a pre-production environment and let your organization experience it hands-on, gaining an on-the-job training. Use an accelerator and let ITQ work with you to discuss, deploy and assess a solution.
Advisory Board
To challenge the CxO’s on a strategic and tactical level, we organize regular meetings with selected advisors with expertise on a range of disciplines, such as Sales, Finance, Technology and Company Leadership. This past month, we’ve been able to proudly welcome an impressive selection of advisors. We’re in good company!
The right time for a vSphere 6 upgrade!
In march of this year, VMware released vSphere 6. Our experience allows us to say that now, after a few minor releases of this version, is a good moment to start planning your “Production” upgrade. The main reason? Its so-called Hybrid Cloud readiness: a lot of new features are there to create a Virtual-Machine-Centric infrastructure.
Read about the technical features of this latest vSphere version, or:
TUS 2015
A month ago, we hosted our annual Technical Update Session, with sessions on Disaster Recovery to the Cloud (vCloud Air), Next-Gen Apps and End User Computing; beyond the virtual desktop. For those of you who missed it (and the smart watches) and those looking for more information: the slide decks and blogs are online.
Hope to see you all next year!
Latest Blogs:
VMware’s EUC acquisitions; does it still make sense? Yes it does!
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change
Disaster Recovery to the Cloud blog series – Part 3: vSphere Replication
