The Great Transformation

Each and every day, I get asked "what is this cloud thing all about?".  

I get asked by customers, partners, analysts, EMC employees, and so on.  Although I've been asked this question for a few years now, my answer keeps getting better.

I think the answer is important.

Too small or limited an answer, and people won't get the enormity of what's going on in our industry.  Too big an answer, and people won't be able to wrap their heads around it.

So let me share with you my current best take on "what is this cloud thing all about?".

A Thought Experiment

Think of our traditional and familiar IT industry as a giant and very compliated Lego model.

You've got part of the model that has all the vendors: big ones, small ones, new ones, old ones.

You've got how all their technology goes to market: direct sales force, resellers, integrators, retail, and so on.

You've got the IT organizations within enterprises: their roles, their processes, their positioning, their value proposition.

You've got the people within IT: their skills, roles and value propositions.

You've got the people in organizations who actually use IT to create value: their expectations, their needs.

All wrapped up in one, glorious, complicated Lego model.  A thing of beauty to behold -- for a moment.

Now Throw It On The Floor

That's right.  Pick it up, and throw it on the floor with force.  Bang!  

The individual pieces don't break, but they're now scattered everywhere.

You can still see the componentry and objects that used to comprise the model, but they've lost their association with each other.  

There isn't any less IT stuff, it's just rather disorganized right now.

And now we get to repackage and re-assemble everything to build a new (and potentially far better) model out of essentially the same pieces.

Putting It All Back Together.

Infrastructure technology gets re-assembled around virtualization, convergence, IaaS and delivering services.  Certain new technologies are needed (e.g. orchestration, federation), but -- at the end of the day, you've got your familiar server, storage, network, etc. -- just in a different arrangement.

Application technology gets the same treatment -- we still have data management, middleware, application logic, user interfaces, and so on.  Ditto for security, GRC, operations, analytics, etc.  

You can still see all the various pieces; they've just changed a bit in how they're constructed and interact with other components.

Users still are using devices to get to their information and workflows -- they're just different devices in a different context.  

Nothing really new here, if you think about it.

If you look at it a while, you can see the patterns for how the new pieces will come together.  Sure, there will be debates about the "best" way to build the new model, but -- usually -- we're arguing at the periphery.  The design patterns are turning out to be roughly the same in the new model.

Keep in mind, though, that we're just considering the technology bits.  Indeed, that's what technology people tend to do: discuss and evaluate different technologies, and how they might be assembled together.

My argument is that there's far more to re-constructing our Lego-based IT model around "cloud" than just shiny new technologies.  Important, yes -- but hardly complete.

The Vendors Are Shifting

Any time there's a big disruption in the IT vendor industry, the pecking order changes.  Big vendors have less power and influence, smaller vendors get an opportunity to improve their standing and relevance.

And that's exactly what's happening here.  

Personally, as I look at EMC's extended portfolio, I see technologies that are far more interesting and relevant in the new world than they might have been in the old one.  And as you look at different industry players through the new lens vs. the old one, your assessment of their importance changes dramatically.

The Value Chain Is Shifting

Cloud is creating entirely new IT consumption models -- enter the era of the IT service provider.  

Instead of enterprises buying and running IT stuff, they can consume the end product of IT as a service: infrastructure, applications, user experience, IT management functions -- you name it, and there's an increasingly attractive way to consume it "as a service".  

And the level of investment by SPs in making these new IT services available can be quite staggering to comprehend.

Many of these options weren't really available before, or -- in many cases -- they weren't as attractive as they are today.  The forecast is simple: there will be many more external and internal consumption options, and they'll be increasingly more attractive over time.

Back to our Lego model: you'll still see the same pieces, they'll just be arranged in more attractive ways for you to consume.

The Role Of IT Is Shifting

When IT starts to think of itself as the "internal service provider" for the organization, interesting things start to happen.  First, if IT can't do better than an external service for something, they'll use the external service -- all things being equal.  

This means that -- over time -- IT tends to focus on things that make them unique and valuable to the organization vs. simply struggling to re-invent the wheel that's available off-the-shelf through alternative means.  Typically, their value-add shifts to something more important: they understand the business, and what people are trying to get done.

They get more consultative as a result.  They bias for speed and agility vs. building pyramids.  They bring the very best of IT thinking to the big table and position it as a set of capabilities that can increase differentiation, effectiveness and ultimately competitiveness.

It's a beautiful thing when you see it :)

The Role Of The IT Professional Is Shifting As Well

Anyone who's been an IT professional for any length of time will realize that you're only as good as your skills.  Learn new skills that are valuable to the organization (and we're not just talking technology disciplines here!) and you'll do well indeed.

As we re-assemble our industry model of IT around cloud concepts, the "connectors", the people who bring the pieces together and make it all happen -- are realizing that -- yes, they're still very important, but that they'll be creating value in new ways than before.  

Stuff that doesn't matter a lot will be either automated, outsourced or consumed as an external service.  Stuff that *does* matter will command a premium in the market.

Exciting -- if challenging -- times indeed.

The Emergence of the IT-Literate Business Professional

There's a dangerous and unproductive mindset you'll sometimes see -- that it's only IT people who really "get" IT.  While that might be true in some situations, it's becoming less true every day.

We have an entire emerging generation of workers and leaders who were "born digital" -- they've been around information technology their entire working lives.  

They know what it can do.  They know what it can't do.  And they know what they need and want from their IT organizations.  And, of course, like all smart business people, if they can't get what they want internally, they'll go outside to see if someone can help them.  

Simply assuming that non-IT people don't "get it" is asking for trouble.  Yes, I've heard lots of stories of business people doing really dumb things when it comes to IT.  I've also heard just as many stories of IT people doing really sumb things when it comes to IT.

Add your expertise to theirs, and wonderful things can happen.

The New Shape Of IT?

Information -- and information technology -- is becoming ever-more important with every passing day. 

There appears to be no shortage of demand of people who want to consume technology and information in ever-more-clever and productive ways.  That's not going to change for the forseeable future.

What is changing fast is the model for how IT is done -- how those pieces are assembled, operationalized and consumed.

And that is what I think this "cloud" thing is all about.

Comments

[Sudhir Brahma]

Is this a transformation or it is going back to the old Unix/VAX way of working, where several users log into these machines concurrently, and consume their compute and storage resources for running their applications? The Unix machine of the olden days is now called the "cloud", this time with more compute power and more storage space. The similarity with the bygone days is compelling.
Essentially, I think it is about concentrating the compute and the storage resources in one "place" (physically or logically) and hiving off the user interface to outside the "cloud".
Question: Do the likes of Hadoop/GFS/Azure give jitters to storage companies like EMC? I ask this question because they seem to have taken on some of the key value-adds of data protection/scalability from the storage boxes and have implemented them with ordinary white server boxes (with a few RAID HBAs thrown in). Dedupe and snapshot seem to still hold their forte with the storage boxes, but will that be a matter of time before the likes of Hadoops/GFS catch up and have it all within. Do you see the re-emergence of the RAID HBA controllers with such "Cloud Operating systems". They provide some significant storage reliability at the node level.
regards
Sudhir.Brahma@gmail.com