It’s a truism of technology that innovation will always tear ahead of a business’s ability to make use of the gear, and software is no different in that regard.
Yet recently bigger vendors have started to address the problem. The chaos created by the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry and the cloud, a trend spearheaded by Salesforce, is now giving way to a period of consolidation, integration and refinement as businesses’ IT needs become more specific.
"Competitively adapting today is based on an organisation’s ability to act quickly," said Zeus Kerravala, an independent analyst, speaking at a Cisco panel debate. By leveraging computer technology businesses can simplify or quicken their everyday operations, and, according to Kerravala, it is now "almost mandatory" that firms do so.
You might have heard similar evangelising over the potential of development operations (DevOps), which seeks to break the boundary between software developers and the business for the sake of efficiency. Cisco, a networking firm rapidly moving into software, is trying to apply that logic to the entire IT infrastructure, what they call "Fast IT".
"If we can reduce complexity in the IT environment we believe it improves operational efficiencies and makes it more effective," said Gordon Thomson, MD of enterprise networking at Cisco EMEAR. He argued that process reduces costs, which ultimately allows companies to invest in more innovation.
In real terms this can be as simple as adding enterprise apps to a worker’s phone, granting them more information when they are away from their desks. More broadly it means allowing IT to automate more tasks, integrate what may well have been disparate departments, and even change the way a company operates on a daily basis.
"We already have to face the extraordinary speed of IT, the expectations of the customers and also our internet customers," said Thomas Gessler, CIO at the dental company Heraeus Kulzer. "So we have to look for smart solutions."
The agility of steel
For "Fast IT" to be more than a marketing phrase it must invigorate the entire stack a company uses. "The problem has been the networks have been about as agile as a piece of steel," Kerravala said. "And I think [this] has been the limiting factor in an organisation’s ability to change quickly."
If that does not sound difficult enough, the network itself is about to be blown wide open by the Internet of Things (IoT), which will connect everything from your fridge to your pacemaker to a network. What is more, all of that may be feeding data into a centralised system so that efficiency can be further improved.
This strain on IT has also prompted calls for greater speciality of functions and apps, posing challenges to the business model of hardware and software vendors. "We can’t continue to a la carte purchase these small features we need for our routers and our services," said Marc Duvoisin, VP of software services at Dimension Data. "That innovation needs to just be available to us."
Cisco, for its part, will now unbundle the hardware and software, a move that used to be unthinkable among those shifting tin. In turn, Kerravala said, the current model of hardware driving software sales will be turned on its head, which means that the quality of that software is now key to the hardware strategy.
For companies unwilling to push forward, IT now poses a threat. As Kerravala put it: "The ability to survive is the ability to adapt; It’s not necessarily about who’s the strongest."
