by Barry Murphy
Last week, John Patzakis here at X1 blogged about the VMworld 2014 event and how it has become the Comdex for enterprise IT. I was at the show and it was very clear that end-users are the future of IT. The trend has been talked about for quite some time and is commonly called the consumerization of IT. The heat around that topic has tended to focus on devices and not as much on what is behind information access on those devices. But, as BYOD takes off and mobility becomes increasingly important, enterprises care more and more about the flow and availability of information. Why? Because easy access to information is critical to the end-user acceptance of enterprise IT offerings; when users cannot quickly find what they are looking for, they reject what IT rolls out to them. Without that end-user acceptance, there is no chance for a positive ROI on any IT project.
End-user experience is so key that VMware has named a division of its company “End User Computing.” That EUC unit made several major acquisitions in the last year, including Airwatch and Desktone. This is because technology providers need to win the battle with end-users. For an example of a company that built its business on the backs of end-users and leveraged those relationships to bully its way into enterprise IT, look no further than Apple. As VDI users have learned, it is critical to bake search requirements into virtual desktop deployments from the get-go in order to ensure an optimal user experience. And, as Brian Katz points out in his blog, the same thing will hold true with mobile – usability will be key. That is why we at X1 are so excited about the future. X1’s user interface for search is second to none. And, users actually rave about it.
In my days as an industry analyst, I rarely had technology users raving about the tools they were using. And, I never ever had an enterprise search user tell me that their solution solved the challenge of finding information quickly. The rabid users of X1 have been an eye opener for me. In fact, an X1 customer recently polled its users and virtually every user said that X1 is easy to learn and use (no easy feat for a piece of enterprise software) and over 70% of users described their experience with X1 as very positive or positive. Those numbers are unheard of in terms of technology satisfaction.
With what I’ve learned from my days as an analyst and in my time here at X1, I’ve come up with some ways to approach enterprise search in a way that is both IT and user-friendly. We will share the knowledge in a webinar on October 9 at 1pm ET / 10am PT. We’ve titled it, “Making Enterprise Search Actually Work by Putting User Experience First.”
In this “no-death-by-PowerPoint” webinar, attendees will not only learn, but actually see how to deploy enterprise search solutions in ways that make both end-users and IT departments happy. This webinar will demonstrate both why and how to put end-user experience first. Specifically, attendees will learn:
- Why the human brain is the best analytical engine for business productivity search
- How federation can save IT time, money, and headaches
- How to best deploy search solutions in all IT infrastructures
- How to achieve ROI on enterprise search in ways never seen in the past
- That search can be like BASF – it can make many other technology deployments better, including VDI, SharePoint, and Enterprise Vault
I will be presenting on this webinar and will be joined by some special guests to be named later. Come learn why search and end-user computing go hand-in-hand.
Register for the webinar here >