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carrie saarinen

Young, J. (2011). Colleges Unite to Drive Down Cost of 'Cloud Computing'. The Chronicle... - 0 views

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    This article introduces the reader to the concept of collective bargaining for campus information technology by considering the 2011 announcement of a partnership between desktop computer giant Hewlett Packard (HP) and higher education consortium Internet2. Collective bargaining is not viewed as the norm for higher education where individual colleges prefer to act as individuals, each perceiving themselves as completely unique even among peer institutions, but it has taken root in recent years due to a need to regain control over campus IT services in the wake of a surge in consumer technology use among faculty, staff and students. The cost benefit of collective bargaining is aimed at campus IT consumers but clearly there is a significant benefit for the IT providers as well, in this case, for HP. At the time this article was written, many colleges and universities were struggling to rebalance campus budgets, including reigning in IT costs. Meanwhile, consumer electronics were booming as smartphone sales surpassed standard cell phone sales and laptops outpaced desktop sales, and the war in tablet computing raged between Apple iPads, Amazon's Kindle Fire, and Google's Nexus 7. Students, faculty and staff were walking onto campus with multiple web enabled devices, draining campus Internet services and changing the way campus hardware was used. With more mobile services being used and aging desktop clusters needing to be managed, campus IT had to start thinking about strategies to control its investments. Cloud technologies were gaining in popularity at the time, and this article outlines the ways in which campuses began moving to the cloud to cut costs and to meet evolving user needs. The partnerships described in the article between companies like HP and cloud hosting service Box and Internet2 schools show that there are benefits to the members, but the author also recognizes that faculty, students and staff will likely continue to utilize their own devices and
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