The 4th annual Texas Technology Summit has come and gone. The topic for the event was "What is the IT Landscape going to look like in 5 years?" but honestly the majority of the people we spoke to spent more time talking about what was hurting their IT department, and the businesses they work for, today.
For Whitehat, the Texas Technology Summit was a great event. The response we received at the show tells me what we are talking about and doing is a real need in the market right now.
Our “Profiting from a Positive End User Experience” presentation struck a positive chord with the people we met. You could see audience members nodding their heads in agreement as we talked about the issues we see on a regular basis in the field.
You could hear the frustration in their voice as they talked about problems that were in the visibility gap between VMware and Citrix. They were tired of the fact that their best solution to fix Citrix was to blow away the end users profile to temporarily fix the issues. They have no proactive it managment, they know that they are no closer to fixing the underlying problem, and have no idea where to begin.
We met with an IT Director of a municipality that is suffering from a case of what we call “NoTicket-it is.” He has the exact opposite problem. His end users complain to each other when they have performance problems (statistics say that an average end user will have an issue 8 times before calling the Support Desk unless the issue is critical) but do not open a ticket to get the issue addressed.
Instead the complaints travel via grapevine until business management confronts the CIO with news that their end users are not happy with the network environment. The CIO checks with the Support Desk, finds no tickets, and frustration sets in. NoTicket-it is.
How do you fix problems you can’t see?
We had one new customer before our presentation was even complete!
We tackled a lot of serious questions, like:
Our collective experience in the virtualization/Citrix/VMware and Microsoft space brought us to the realization a long time ago that the ultimate metric that matters in any business is the End User Experience. If you can measure, track, and keep the end user experience in check, then things like CPU utilization, RAM utilization, network latency, while still important, become secondary.
If you are wrestling with how to find profit (or savings) through improving your own end user experience and more proactive it management along the way, the take away is this: