Can you sack your IT department?

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Between the credit crunch, the consumerisation of IT and the rise of cloud services, the role of the IT department is going to change.

"Email is very close to people's hearts and I don't want to cause a revolt in something that is pretty key to people's productivity. That's why I moved first. But you know what, it kind of works," he said.

"Google backs up the email, which is better that most small and medium businesses do which is nothing."

There are still some issues, including syncing contacts onto the BlackBerry, but he says it's "90 per cent there," adding "And I can licence the whole company for $40,000 a year."

Since Burton took over at Serena he's already phased out a lot of traditional IT systems. "We got rid of the marketing system and went to MarketRight. We got rid of the sales system and went to Salesforce, we got rid of the anti-spam and went to Postini, we got rid of big chunks of the intranet and we use Facebook," he details.

"We got rid of the support system. We have eight or nine cloud-based systems and we're going to keep doing it. We do have CRM but we're going to get rid of it for Salesforce. I don't want 50 guys managing infrastructure, I want 50 guys helping us build the company."

Mary Branscombe
Mary Branscombe

Mary is a freelance business technology journalist who has written for the likes of ITPro, CIO, ZDNet, TechRepublic, The New Stack, The Register, and many other online titles, as well as national publications like the Guardian and Financial Times. She has also held editor positions at AOL’s online technology channel, PC Plus, IT Expert, and Program Now. In her career spanning more than three decades, the Oxford University-educated journalist has seen and covered the development of the technology industry through many of its most significant stages.

Mary has experience in almost all areas of technology but specialises in all things Microsoft and has written two books on Windows 8. She also has extensive expertise in consumer hardware and cloud services - mobile phones to mainframes. Aside from reporting on the latest technology news and trends, and developing whitepapers for a range of industry clients, Mary also writes short technology mysteries and publishes them through Amazon.