ON June 2015 | Page 23

But SharePoint is supposed to be about giving employees a first-class user experience—through efficient content search functionality and robust collaboration tools—that enhances productivity. As such, implementing SharePoint in an environment where employees don’t have the skills or knowledge to leverage it properly defeats the purpose of the deployment and harms rather than enhances efficiency. “People want SharePoint, but often they are not sure what it does and they don’t know how to use it,” says David Feldman, Senior Technical Director at Atrion. FlexPod: As the data center equipment organizations adopted during the virtualization boom of 2010-2011 nears the end of its life, CIOs are tasked with deciding whether to buy more of the same kind of compute and storage solutions or migrate to something different. Many of these senior IT leaders are taking a hard look at FlexPod— an integrated computing, networking, and storage solution developed by Cisco and NetApp—for the scalability and flexibility it offers. The buying process for data center equipment can get extremely complex, however, as senior IT leaders try to evaluate a wide range of options with the knowledge that, because these products are quite expensive, the stakes are high. In other words, the expectation is that the solution is provisioned quickly and seamlessly and that it performs optimally long-term. “As a CIO, once you have confidence with your data center and the level of services you are delivering to your customers, you can push that out to the rest of the organization and be confident that what you have is world class,” says Dave Oakman, Director of Innovation at Atrion. HOW CERTAIN ARE YOU? When it comes to adopting costly technology solutions, nothing is worse for a CIO than creeping doubt about whether it will function properly and provide robust ROI. We understand from our experiences with our esteemed clients that CIOs and IT departments crave certainty in their deployments and project management but they aren’t always sure where to find it. To learn more about achieving a level of certainty with these technologies, check out the resources below: Three CIO Takeaways from Our Certainty Webinar Calling All CIOs: It’s Time to Change Your Middle Name to Certainty