An interesting article popped up today about BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) over at Citrix. It’s a very interesting program and one I think more and more companies will start over the next few years. I’ve already seen similar things largely in the insurance industry. I work with one such customer where the independent agent buys their own computers and simply connects that to the corporate network. As a matter of fact, my father and brother are agents for NationWide insurance and do just that – they BYOC and have been since the agency started back in 1989. I’m sure the program goes back farther than that but that’s when my father joined Nationwide.
Here at VMware we have an informal BYOC program. Several of the SEs in the field buy their own laptops when they either want something different or more powerful that isn’t yet supported by corporate. Our “corporate” image is simply a VM that you download off the corporate network and run on your laptop. When I started with the company we used Dell laptops. That was fine but I needed something with more memory than the corporate standard could handle so I bought my own IBM Thinkpad. I P2V’d the standard Dell image into a VM and ran it on my Thinkpad. Later on down the road (about 1 year ago) I switched to a Macbook Pro 17″. All I had to do was copy my standard corporate image over and continue running. Today employees get their choice of a couple of Dell models, and couple of IBM models, or a Macbook Pro. Of course you can also still BYOC and connect in that way.
At yet another customer they used to send home corporate assets to employee’s homes so they could work remotely. With the advent of VMware ACE they now just give the employee a DVD with the corporate VM image and let the employee use their own PC. My wife’s work is thinking about doing this. She works for a local hospital and has a corporate asset at home. She actually just uses her own laptop and the asset sits in the basement since everything is presented to her via Citrix today (yes, VMware, I’m trying to change that).
It will be interesting to see how this BYOC model gets adopted moving forward. It makes sense for a lot of reasons. There are some challenges to be figured out – mostly how to change the purchasing and budget and accounting models. Once you figure out the challenges though the model seems to make the company and the employee much happier.
If you have a BYOC model please comment and let the other readers know what you’ve seen.
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