Does your future office come without PC's? This one does now!

(From Kevin Casey - InformationWeek) Could the iPad soon be as common a sight on construction jobs as the hard hat?

It will if the industry follows the example of the Silicon Valley Builders Group (SVBG). The 100-person construction firm’s technology approach is producing what its executives believe is a true competitive advantage in an age-old industry–an edge that has helped SVBG hit the $100 million annual revenue milestone in just five years.

Roughly two-third of the SVBG team works almost exclusively in the field, and they’re not toting laptops: They operate entirely with iPhones and iPads, primarily using the cloud collaboration app Soonr.

The 35 or so folks in SVBG’s actual office work on thin clients; the company’s infrastructure is entirely virtualized, with no desktops or latops in sight. SVBG does offer project managers an allowance to purchase a PC for home use so they can remotely access their virtual machines, though it doesn’t provide any hardware support. Aside from a small server room on-site, their data is kept almost entirely in Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

The mix of mobile devices, desktop virtualization, cloud applications, and cloud data allows CIO Shaun Coleman to operate as a one-man IT department, aside from outside vendors and a part-time staffer. Coleman’s no stranger to virtualization: He came from VMware, and SVBG’s founders previously worked at Sun Microsystems.

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