451 Group's Daniel Beazer presents a keynote at the Open-Xchange Summit Friday
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The opening keynote at Friday’s Open-Xchange summit was delivered by Daniel Beazer , a senior researcher for EMEA at Tier1 Research, one of the presenters at last week’s London World Hosting Days event as well.
He set out to discuss an era of disruption in the technology business, one that can basically be boiled down to the death of the desktop, but the more specific conditions of which include ubiquitous tablets and smartphones, apps running across multiple OS and devices, open platforms, the importance of hardware and the overtaking of the IT space by consumer behavior.
With some data about ISP consumers buying habits, he showed that consumers are incredibly fickle, particularly on the issue of price. However, this is an opportunity in the ISP business for companies to get away from the commodity/price battle and become more service based.
The major disruptive factor he focused on, however, was the move away from the desktop, and even the PC, toward the tablet and smartphone, even in the business space, where many organizations are finding uses for tablets, and becoming more open to the Android and iOS platforms.
From there he moved on to a discussion of email, as a product and kind of as an idea.
He says one of the great virtues of email (in his informal research) is that it is asynchronous – that is, it’s not real-time. You can communicate easily through email, for instance, with a person who is working in a completely different time zone, and not have your respective schedules disrupt the flow of your email communication.
And people aren’t necessarily abandoning email for “better” tools, like SharePoint collaboration, for instance. In many cases, people use email for document sharing. Beazer says there is a certain kind of collaborative work for which the audit trail that email provides is really essential. He says this is a reason why archived email has become Rackspace’s number one cloud product.
Social media has an interesting influence in this space. But as a tool to replace email, or even to exist in a meaningful way within the corporate workflow, Beazer isn’t so optimistic. Of course, social media is a significant force, and we’ll have to work on ways to integrate that. But ultimately, email address is still the fundamental online identity (it’s even the one you use to create your social media identity, for instance).
But he says email is increasingly hosted (in the Exchange server sense) and there’s a little bit of delay involved there, which means that from a simply bandwidth-based perspective people are starting to use those other tools – IM, Dropbox, etc. – to work on projects.
He says the modern, non-desktop world has some simple demands. He says a stripped down OS means apps and a seamless experience. The user experience is important, not the features. He’d like to see social media with respect for privacy. He’d also like to see service providers working with developers to provide value adds.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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