IT Needs a New Drug

Let's talk about the next era of information technology (IT). We seem to be in it, but we don't have a name for it yet.

Suddenly, "cloud computing" is the dominant buzzword of the day, but the current confluence of trends includes much more. There is business process modeling (BPM), business intelligence (BI), complex event processing (CEP), service-oriented architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS), Web-oriented architecture (WOA), and even Enterprise 2.0.

How do all of these relate? Or if they don't relate, is there a common theme? Is there an overriding über direction for IT that we need to consider?

For me, the cloud computing moniker just doesn't include enough and doesn't bring us to the next stage. In the words of Huey Lewis, we need a "new drug." So what is the next über IT phase for next generation enterprise technology?

Listen to the podcast (57:10 minutes).

Here to help us understand what the new IT drug is, join me in welcoming our analysts panel this week. We are joined by Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Brad Shimmin, senior analyst, Current Analysis; Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger; Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, and we also might be joined in a little while by Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum.

But let's start out with our über definition. Jim Kobielus, do you agree with me that we're oversimplifying what's going on in IT by just calling everything that's going on cloud computing?

Jim Kobielus: Of course, we're oversimplifying, but that's what we, as analysts, need to do now and then. There is just too much stuff, too much complexity, too many themes, and too many paths for evolution and innovation.

I agree with you, Dana, we all get worn out by these themes, trying to jam too much into them. Half the time I'm thinking we need to move to a post-theme era in IT and have a themeless architecture.

Half the time, with all these themes, I feel like I'm in Disneyland. I'm walking in Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, and, after a while, I sort of lose sight of the overall big park through which I'm roaming. I want an über Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS) to stand above it and say, "Here is my vision for the great magical journey we're on."

I don't think that Great Uncle Walt will emerge from the sky, but I do think we need to ask ourselves what value these themes add. These are all valuable frameworks -- SOA, cloud, virtualization, enterprise 2.0, SaaS, and so forth, but they're valid and valuable for particular uses and for particular ways of approaching and managing the technology. None of them is superfluous, but none of them will become the über theme for everything we might ever want to do with technology.

Dana Gardner: Well, Brad Shimmin, it seems though that something has shifted in the last six months. Perhaps it's because of the recession, the contracting economy, but it certainly feels different than it did six months ago. Do you agree?

Shimmin: It does. Even in the last few weeks, now that we have the swine flu economy upon us. It seems that so many of us are in the midst of knee-jerk reactions to things within the industry and within our little sphere that we live on, but something more profound has changed over the last couple of years.

Going back to what Jim was talking about, it's so hard to put a finger on it and describe it. It's almost like the art scene at the turn of the century. They really didn't know what the hell to call what people were making. So, they just said, "Oh, it's postmodern." So, the postmodern IT world is perhaps what we're living in. Maybe that's okay, where there is no really overriding sort of thematic vision to IT, but I'm an analyst so I always try to like put labels on things.

My attempt with this is to describe just the zeitgeist I've seen over the last year or so, and that is just to call things -- with a double entendre totally intended here, and it's not sexual, by the way, or drug related -- "transparent computing." That's is what I'd look at this as.

The double part of this is IT resources and business solutions are becoming more visible to us. We're able to better measure them. We're able to better assess their cost-to-value ratio. At the same time, the physicality of those resources and the things that we call a business are becoming much more transparent to us and much more ethereal, in terms of being sucked into Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) EC2, for example.

Gardner: What do you think, Joe McKendrick, is it the "open the kimono" technology era?

Joe McKendrick: I think so. I don't think there's a name we can give it. Perhaps computing has become so ubiquitous to our everyday lives and our everyday work that it no longer needs to carry a name. We don't call this era the "telephone era" or the "television era." For that matter, we don't call it the "space age" anymore. The novelty and the newness of all this is worn off.

Looking back over at the past six months or even five or six years, a big thing that's been happening is that business users really understand computing. Computing is such an everyday thing that folks understand. At the same time, the IT folks are beginning to understand the business a little bit better and we're seeing those two worlds being brought together and blending.

Gardner: This is a George Costanza moment: worlds are colliding.

McKendrick: Worlds are colliding.

Kobielus: Dana, I just noticed something. This decade that we're currently ending has no name. Last decade it was the '90s, the one before that was the '80s, we've never given this decade a real name that's stuck chronologically. Likewise, this era that we are now entering doesn't have a name and maybe it shouldn't have a name, it's the "double-0 era."

Gardner: You're right, we don't have a name. Ron Schmelzer, do you think we need a name for this? It seems that now we're talking about a post-IT era, because IT is so pervasive that we don't even need to break it out anymore, that it's just part of everything?

Ron Schmelzer: We could say that we're still floating through the information era, but I like what Jim was talking about, the floating from one theme park to the other theme park in Disneyland, as we've been doing here in IT, to a certain extent.

I'm going to bring back the drug theme here. I might as well. We like to self-medicate in IT. We have these chronic problems that we seem to be continuously trying to solve. They're the same problems: getting systems to talk to each other, to extract information, and to make it all work. We try one drug after the other and they provide these short-term fixes. Then, there's the inevitable crash afterward, and we just never seem to solve the underlying problem.

If we had to get back to that Disney theme, there actually was one that tied them all together. What was the theme at Disneyland? "It's a small world after all." Isn't it? I like to bring it all back to IT. All these things we do, they're all looking very similar. Tying in the recent presidential campaign, maybe we are the change we are looking for. So maybe it's not really about the technology. Maybe it's the way that we're sitting here using the stuff, and it's more a change to process than it is to technology.

Kobielus: And, taking that theme just a little further, it's amazing what you can do with a mouse.

Gardner: Tony Baer, we've been talking about needing a new drug in IT. I think we've stumbled into something interesting. Individuals in their lives, corporations, governments, maybe even entire industries, some of which are encumbered by technology or held back if it's a "platform-based technology," can't move with the times.

Other organizations, individuals, or networks of people embracing what we now are calling loosely "cloud computing" are able to be fleet agile, move on a dime, change their business, and not be encumbered by their own data centers or their own platforms. There seems to be a gulf between the two.

One group is able to be productive and perhaps redefine business and even culture and society relationships. The other is suffering terribly with massive layoffs, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, in a sense a meltdown, even bankruptcies at a scale never expected.

How do you see it, Tony? Is the gap here between technologies? Is it between platforms? How can we reconcile these two?

Tony Baer: Well, there are a couple of things. There is always the advantage of the late starter, and there is always a disadvantage of the first starter. One of the things that came to my mind this week is the imminent demise of Cassatt, which was onto the idea of private clouds before its time.

On the other hand, if you're a late starter and the technology or the market has already proven itself, you can then start to innovate with the latest methodologies or technologies, whatever, without being burdened by all the baggage.

Gardner: Are we talking about more than just the innovator's dilemma here? Aren't we really moving into a new era, because everyone is always an innovator, if you look at the cloud model?

Baer: Right. I'm coming a little bit out of context here, but I do think that we're into a new era, where you need to shave your cost structure and all your baggage that keeps you stuck in one place.

On the other hand, what I was about to lead up to is that you can start nice and fast, but then as you start to get into the scale up and scale out, in other words, when you start to become a victim of your own success, there are some lessons that some veterans have learned. Veterans who haven't been bogged down by legacy infrastructure learn that if you've just come into this race, you might think this doesn't apply to you, but it does.

So, on one hand, yes, I do think we are at a point where there are some basic structural changes that are happening, but at the same time, the old rule still applies. Once you get to a certain scale, you need to know how to manage it, whether it be technology, people, communications, process, or whatever.