IT Nostalgia – Is it A Thing of the Past?

I read an interesting blog post recently entitled “Three Ways to Market Nostalgia in Social Communities.” As someone who has enjoyed more than a few good moments of nostalgia I thought maybe this topic would provide fertile ground for discussion.  Apparently products from the past are in vogue, such as retro versions of Pepsi and Coke, but does this have any relevance to IT?

While I can understand someone enjoying the nostalgic connection with Frosted Flakes’ Tony the Tiger saying “They’re Gr-r-reat!” is there anyone out there yearning for the days of 20,000 vacuum tubes and the Eniac Computer or the FORTRAN computer language or the Pong computer game – okay on the last one I admit a small tinge of nostalgia.  Is there anything we miss about the past in IT? Computer Cards, Room-size computers, the floppy disk?

And by inference does this mean that everything new in IT is good?  One of the challenges with IT is the pace of progress.  Products and technologies are being rapidly superceded so where does that leave the IT staff and the vendors who are trying to keep pace?

At Accellion we have experienced first hand the widespread adoption of virtual and cloud environments and the rapidly changing landscape for IT deployments.  Since we introduced the industry’s first virtual appliance for secure file transfer back in November 2007, now more than 80% of Accellion secure file transfer deployments are into virtual environments.  Originally we supported just VMware, and have since added support for Citrix XenServer and also most recently Microsoft Hyper-V.  And we see the same steep adoption curve happening this year with cloud deployments.

Today, deployment of Accellion secure file transfer can take just minutes and that’s a good thing for everyone. Some of our earliest customers from 2005 and 2006 are now replacing their original Accellion physical appliances with virtual and/or cloud deployments – it’s great to see them enjoying a whole new flavor of Accellion.

Are we nostalgic for the time when we were on first name terms with the FedEX guy, shipping large volumes of physical servers out to our customers – no way.

About Paula Skokowski

Paula Skokowski has written 66 post in this blog.

Paula is the Chief Marketing Officer at Accellion.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Accellion, Cloud, Virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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