Two recent dynamics have occurred in Enterprise IT that serve to accelerate the gap
between applications and infrastructure advancement.
1. Outsourcing
activities are Slowing infrastructure advancement
Outsourcing is now more popular than ever and the rise of
the Service Provider is fueling this change.
Let’s look at the growth of traditional on-prem outsourcing contracts
and the use of these on-prem contracts to migrate enterprise workloads to
vendor managed clouds. This is why the
predominant growth and certainly where they’re betting future growth will occur
out of the likes of: HP, IBM and CSC, is in their Service Provider business.
This is the legacy of the outsourcing business where EDS, IBM GS and CSC
competed for long-tail 3-5 year on-prem, outsourcing deals. As IBM builds up
their enterprise cloud business with Softlayer, the margin can only be
tolerated within these services orgs. These management and operating contracts
are now the vehicles to migrate these workloads to private and public clouds.
The migration of these on-prem relationships to the vendor
cloud will continue as these large system houses leverage their long-term customer
relationships to migrate these workloads to their vendor clouds.
An interesting dynamic kicks in when a company has decided
to migrate an enterprise workload to a Service Provider relationship, the
rate of change is now tied to the framework of the outsourcing contract. In other words, the Service Providers
have an agreement with the customers to manage a set environment for a set
amount. Now if a customer desires to
migrate to say a different platform or app version, this is a scope change to
the management contract and has cost implications. This dynamic usually kills all platform
migration deals of legacy systems.
The true costs are the limits put on business agility.
2. The use of New App
Dev models is Accelerating
So while the legacy slows, new app development
accelerates. It accelerates with the
rise, availability and ease of use of the next generation platforms. You can use Couch, Mongo, and Hadoop etc. as
on-prem open source DB or use the same from AWS as a service. You can provision resources instantaneously
and be productive immediately. Code
snippets are grabbed from Open Source libraries and code banks. Any function
from how to do an asset depreciation module to molecular dynamics exists in a
code bank somewhere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_software_packages
This new App Dev is all done on commodity
infrastructure. It has to be.
Infrastructure that is RESTful, API driven and 100% commoditized. The rate of
hardware commoditization is visibly killing EMC, NetApp, IBM and HP among
others. These models and margins will
simply cease to exist.
It is time to narrow
the gap
So while the legacy slows to a crawl due to technical and
business inertia, new app dev is screaming. The combination is great for the
vendors who embrace this accelerated change, divorce themselves from the past
and fully embrace the future.
The only way IT can deliver infrastructure for the new
paradigm of App Dev is to adopt a Public Cloud like model and deliver services
on top of commodity infrastructure. Services that can be delivered with the
Speed, QOS, Control and Costs that are available if not better than the Public
Cloud.
This infrastructure simply cannot be delivered on antiquated
platforms that are tied to supporting the past.
Remember the old Cobol Compilers that ran on the PC that took Cobol
Code, compiled and executed it on the PC. Short-lived, bridges of backward
compatibility that were rooted in the past not then future.
That is why Captain Ramius was right when he said, “Upon reaching the new world, Cortez burned
his ships, as a result, his men were well motivated”
Legacy is just that.
The past. Therefore, #Demandincompatibility
and move ahead to deliver agile value to the business.
