There’s a lot of interest in changing the way organizations work these days. A lot of this effort is an outgrowth of a “consumerization of IT” phenomenon that is allowing end users to increasingly define not only how they want to work, but what tools they want to use.
On one level this is incredibly good thing. As employees begin to bend IT more to their will; they generally become more productive. The challenge, of course, is finding a way to do that securely. As evidenced by all the security concerns about services such as Drobox.com, it’s clear that there are not enough controls in place to support the “consumerization of IT.”
Naturally, this situation has contributed mightily to the rise of any number of secure cloud computing services. The trouble is that many of those services seek to impose a specific workflow system that are not particularly flexible.
To address that issue DataMotion today is launching an update to the DataMotion Platform, a hub for sharing encrypted files and messages across multiple sever platforms and client systems that can deployed on premise as a private cloud, in the cloud by the solution provider as a private or public cloud, or accessed as a public cloud service.
According to Pete Cafarchio, DataMotion vice president of business development, the DataMotion Platform transparently integrates with applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise, Salesforce.com, Citrix and every major smartphone and tablet device. The new release adds unified reporting on all transactions that pass through the platform.
In conjunction with this release of DataMotion Platform, Cafarchio says the company for the first time is also making the core platform available to business partners for deployment.
Most organizations today recognize that their existing workflow systems are both inefficient and inflexible. But they are too heavily invested in business processes tied to, for example, their e-mail systems to rip and replace those systems. Many of them would like to move to cloud-based systems that are better integrated with any number of mobile computing platforms. They just need an approach that allows that transition to take place gradually, versus causing disruptions to business processes that wind up costing the company more than the software is often worth.
Existing systems, however, are not only expensive to operate, they frequently require employees to set up convoluted processes because the software is hard coded in one way or another. In fact, the real channel opportunity associated with offerings such as DataMotion Platform might have more to do with business consulting than the reselling of the actual software. After all, most companies have become so conditioned to operate within the limitations of their existing software, rather than thinking in terms of the art of what is truly possible. What most customers really want is software that bends to the way they want to work, which is one of the primary reasons we see so many end users rebelling against IT in the name of the "consumerization of IT."
Not every solution provider is, of course, equipped to serve in the capacity. But there are plenty of business consultants who are. The opportunity that creates is for solution providers to partner with business consultants that may not necessarily understand how the software works, but certainly know what can be accomplished using it.