About the Enterprise Hardware training

In the early days of computers, few businesses saw many worthwhile use cases for these novel, monstrous machines. But that changed fast.

By the 1980s, much smaller computers were viable: ‘personal computers,’ or PCs, which businesses soon began buying for select employees. Before long, all these computers could be connected together in a sort of web - both via a local web within the company and via the public worldwide web, the internet. These webs made something else possible: splitting up various computing and storage tasks across different, connected devices.

Dedicated central computers could now handle certain intensive tasks, like managing vast new databases, and smaller PCs could take less intensive tasks, like word processing. This led to a new computing architecture altogether, where companies maintained so-called data centers capable of storing the bulk of the data and performing the bulk of the computation.

Today, businesses need equipment for the entire ecosystem: the end-user devices (like PCs), the data center, and the devices that create a well-functioning web.

In this Primer, we focus on all the key hardware in the enterprise IT ecosystem. We'll explore the various types of hardware products, how they get made and sold, and the latest trends.

Learning objectives

In this Primer you will learn:

· What hardware products do businesses need for data centers?

· What hardware products do businesses need for end users?

· Who are the companies involved in making and selling enterprise hardware?

· What does it take to make and sell enterprise hardware?

· What are the key trends in enterprise hardware?