The enterprise IT world is coming to grips with a new buzz-TLA; “BYOD”. It stands for Bring Your Own Device and considers the way employees are bringing their own laptops, tables and smart-phones to work and using them in the overlap of life and work. There’s a growing industry of companies who want to help you stop it, cripple it, or control it.
My experiences at Sun Microsystems suggest BYOD is an opportunity waiting to be grasped for enterprise IT executives — a move to management by standards rather than centrally purchased company desktops. It means selecting a basket of server-supported standard capabilities (IMAP, LDAP, PDF, HTML5, ODF, and so on) and telling people that anything that works securely with those standards is acceptable. It also offers the prospect of letting people use open source software that works with those standards, rather than having to buy everyone the same expensive proprietary software and instantly-depreciating hardware, then manage them expensively until they are legacy systems.
You can read my thoughts on this phenomenon – and its potential impact on open source on the desktop – on InfoWorld today.
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