How Technology is Drastically Changing the Future of Business

Todays announcement of 3Tera's AppStore is just another mounting piece of evidence of how technology is drastically changing the business landscape of our future. 3Tera joins Amazon in delivering "cloud ready" components that enterprises, big and small, can quickly get up and running with very little upfront costs. Take at look at 3Tera's website and you see that in Q3 of 2009 they will release many new components..

The AppStore catalog spans all types of data center infrastructure elements and complete applications, from networking components (such as load balancers, firewalls, routers, traffic managers, content switches), server components (such as web servers, directory servers, databases, application servers) and storage solutions, as well as application software stacks, management and monitoring tools.

Expect more software vendors to start partnering with cloud providers like 3Tera and Amazon to create their own cloud ready images on these platforms.

Cloud Computing

So what does this all mean? As the cloud matures over the next several years, the playing field for businesses starts leveling off because of the low cost to entry and the quick time to market that the cloud will be able to offer. Huge capital investments in physical infrastructure will be a thing of the past or left for those with huge amounts of assets still depreciating on the books. But it is not all about the hardware. We are seeing much more enterprise software being "componentized" and delivered as a service. As time goes on, expect the industry to start producing more standards and better interfaces. Integration will become less of a burden as the interfaces become simpler and the industry matures.

Less hardware to buy, patch, and administer coupled with less non-core business software to build will enable startups, small and medium sized businesses, and even large businesses with an agile architecture to move quickly to chase new business opportunities, streamline operational efficiencies, or integrate with partners and/or customers. But there is more to it!

I believe the commoditizing of software and hardware that cloud computing will bring over the next few years will change the way businesses think (see next point).

Standardizing business processes

The ability to outsource business processes to the cloud will force companies to rethink how they view their business processes. Business owners will be forced to justify any exceptions or proprietary processes that prohibit the company from leveraging "cloud ready" business processes. As more companies continue to standardize on business processes, the customer experience becomes more consistent. When this happens, the business processes themselves become a commodity and the importance of customer service rises dramatically. Which leads me to my next point.

Brand Recognition

When the underlying infrastructure, software, and business processes become a commodity, products and services are forced to compete at low prices. This puts many products and services on a level playing field. That increases the importance of the brand which is why companies are investing so much in marketing these days. Expect that trend to go up as the the marketing landscape changes, which leads me to my next point.

Social Marketing

Companies will continue to invest heavily in a toolbox full of social networking tools. Viral social marketing tactics, ones that leverage the power and voice of consumers spreading the word through their own personal networks, will be the tool of choice for marketers. People are watching TV less, reading the paper less, and spending way more time on the Internet. Companies are recognizing this and will continue to target communities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many others. It is already happening. Look at what Pepsi is doing.

Government Influence

The current administration is a huge advocate of social software and cloud computing. Their use of blogs, Flicker, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and streaming video is making these technologies increasing popular. The belief in a more open government is the driving force for the use of these technologies. If the government can implement these technologies, surely our enterprises can. The administration went one step further and created Data.Gov. This initiative will lead to more standardization in data and data services and will force various agencies and companies to change their existing practices in order to integrate with this massive public data source.

The government also has a huge cloud computing strategy which should help push the industry to standardize and address the challenges of privacy, security, compliance, and integration. The government also has a ton of money behind this initiative which should help drive much more innovation in the cloud computing industry.

There is no denying it

So as we all argue about the value of Twitter, Facebook, Cloud Computing and the like, the reality is that they are drastically changing the way businesses think and act. More importantly, customers and workers are actually finding themselves more productive at home using new technologies and are applying serious pressure to companies to sacrifice controls and security in exchange for empowerment and agility. All of this is creating more demand for architects and security experts, and driving down the demand for system administrators and development. IT jobs are not going away, but the roles are shifting. It may not be evident today but follow the trend over the next few years. Many companies will outsource more IT functions then ever before. Smart companies will internally focus more on innovation and less on keeping the lights on.

I see it all changing right before our eyes. We are in the early stages of this transformation and many folks may disagree with this assessment. I truly believe that this administration's investment in technology will drastically increase the rate at which businesses transform to a more outsourced, integrated, and socially connected enterprise.

Comments

[Jonah stein]

Charleton

Nice summary of the 3tera AppStore and why it is such an important announcement. I am just curious why you chose to link to Cnet instead of to http://www.3tera.com/AppStore/. The CNet article is pretty good, but the 3tera resource is like to evolve over time and be an evergreen link. I doubt the article will.

[Kevin Ferrasci OMalley]

Very thought provoking post.
As a long time small business owner two of my least favorite things to do has been 1) to invest in IT technology that I know will soon be obsolete and 2) try to keep all the systems integrated. So it seems that Cloud computing offers some real benefits to small business. That being said I think there are some real concerns over security and privacy that will need to be addressed before most of us will have enough trust to embrace these technologies. Hope you keep writing on this topic

[charltonb]

Cheers - and good point. I should update this.

There are very good points to be made regarding security and privacy, principally the latter. The technology to address the security concerns either has been or is on the verge of being released. However, privacy is more a matter of policy than technology. With some providers scanning your content to target adverts, and certain organisations engaging in rather questionable practices, I expect that privacy will need to be further legislated before one can trust their data in the Cloud, multi-tenancy, etcetera.