I agree (Mobility) is key, more so than just being in the "Cloud". For us at Techtoolbox, we know more and more companies are looking to cut costs by eliminating the "in-house" server farms and all the admin that goes along with it. Truth is, it???s just the old finance game of changing from an unknown cost model to a known cost model hard at work. If you???ve been around long enough you saw the opposite move to distributive computing when Local Area Networks sprang onto the scene in the early 90's. Prior to that, everything was centralized. What we see now is a hybrid of sort because inside the cloud things are still distributed but overall the IT department is becoming more and more centralized, just look at cisco's UCS systems. As the cost for hardware has steadily dropped we see companies investing in Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity more than ever before. This is a sure sign of the drop in technology costs. The cost of redundancy, which was a big luxury item for years, is suddenly in reach for the masses do to technology convergence and virtualization. Now what's needed are good tools that reach into the cloud for remote management and administration. System Admins are no longer going to be able to park a chair in front of the Rack and sit there until the problem is resolved. The old methods of tunneling in are not going to get it anymore. Only the true web based tools are going to rule in the coming years. Our product "Keck" is a real example of a web based secure Active Directory management tool that enables the "Cloud" to seem a little closer. There are others coming on the scene too which enable Admins to management virtually every server side function imaginable. RDC will only get you so far in a pinch and some companies block RDC entirely. Bottom line, Admins are going to demand more and more tools like Keck to get their work done quickly, keep the red cape on and maintain their title of computer Super Guru.

David Harrelson
TTB