A stunning piece of advertorial from InfoWorld via Nortel’s sponsored IDC survey.
a considerable number of what it calls “hyperconnected” users … those using at least seven devices and nine applications … accounted for 16 percent of the population in the study
Behind the hyperconnected were the “increasingly connected,” who use four devices and as many as six applications and account for 36 percent of the population.
i don’t find this hard to believe considering that at home I have a heap of IP-enabled equipment: three routers, a desktop computer (iMac), three laptops (17″ Pro, Air and Asus eeePC) , a slingbox, a game console (Wii) one Internet tablet (Nokia N800), two iPhones and two other internet-capable phones (Nokia and Sony-Ericsson).
The article continues like an infomercial but points out that your local friendly neighbourhood It department may have to change the way they work to allow for more heterogenous workspaces and include platforms like mobile telephones, FaceBook or even game consoles (those that have web browsers built in). How frustrating is it that I can’t just connect to Facebook or LinkedIn to ask a question or to help me in resourcing a new place in my team. I end up having to go home and do my investigations there. IT departments are still driven by paranoia and fear, not for the loss of data, but for the loss of their job.
Unified communications, which is promoted by companies such as Microsoft and Nortel, will make an impact, according to IDC and Nortel. Networks will need to accommodate identity, presence, location, telephony and data.
And we see two companies uniquely qualified to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by making these solutions expensive, proprietary and failure-prone.
I wouldn’t describe myself as hyper-connected even though I’m sitting at a desktop computer with a laptop in my bag, an internet tablet on my right and an iPhone on my left. We need to establish a platform for the hyperconnected, get ubiquitous network access (is this going to be Wifi, WiMax or 3/4G?) and improve the battery life of these devices. And we should get right to resolving these issues as soon as we’ve defeated poverty.