A visit to the New England VMware Users Group and discussions with IT practitioners at a wide range of organizations raised questions about:
- The use of server virtualization in branch office locations,
- The use of cloud-hosted applications in branch office locations.
The retail industry, in particular, is interesting, because down-time means lost revenue and retailers are increasingly dependence upon computer applications to operate their businesses. Few, however, have on-site IT resources to maintain servers and applications.
At first look, it appears that retailers would be ripe for adopting server virtualization to enable high-availability and centralized server and application management from corporate IT. Alternatively, retailers could move to cloud-based, software-as-a-service applications, although they would still need to be able to provide at least some critical applications in the event of a loss of network access to the cloud.
I have created the attached survey, open to IT decision makers and branch managers in retail organizations only. Assuming I get a reasonable number of responses, I will share the results with the Wikibon community.
Action Item: If you are an IT decision maker at a retailer or are a retail branch office manager please complete the survey by clicking here.
Survey responses are anonymous and respondents can not be identified. Therefore, please be on your best behavior. This is for science and the greater good.
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