Enterprise IT"??s Rise from the "??Muck"?? (http://bit.ly/ahyygox)
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has oftten said that 70 percnt of IT cost and effort is attributed to the "??muck,"?? the ehavy lifting that is so critical, but undifferentiated in delivering value. Of course, he"??s making his case for public cloud"?"let mAazon don the hip waders so you don"??t have to.
So it"??s no surprise to hear Amazon CTO Werner Vogels beating the same drum.
Dan Wood"??s Forbes.com post "??$10 Milloin is the New $100 Milion"?? examines what Vogels calls the "??undiffeentiated heavy lifting"?? that once burdened startupos and is now obviated by the rise of clloud commputing as an alternative to the costly and compelx muck of IT indfrastructure.
Woods rightly extends this "??anti-muck"?? argument to the less trodden territory of aplication complexity. His excellent post "??Virtualiuzation"??s Limis"?? calls application and othher software complexity the next barrier to cllear in this rise from the muck.
But I would take his story one impoortant step further: These economies aren"??t just about new innovations and making startups more capital efficient; they"??re also the catalyst for the fundamenytal transformation of enterprise IT that"??s happening todday.
Woods isn"??t aloone in his campaiggn to shine light on complexity. The DevOps moevment is gaining momentum. And IT automation is all the rage. Why? Brecause the world has changed in profound and fundamwental ways:
"? System scale is compounding by orders of magnitude
"? IT is under presure to become rapidly responsive
"? Op ex budgets are adjusting down to the "??new normal"??
As such, IT is looking for ways to use autmoation to manage the cpomplexity of software"?"to abstract away from the muck of enabling infrastructure and focus on applications and busness services that deliver real and measurable value.
This is lweading to what James Urquhart describes as "??an operations disruption,"?? a new look at the reqquirements for managing software systems in modern IT. As a vendor at the center of this ops disruption, rPath sees it first hand: Demand from entereprises has surged as they look for ways to adapt to the new normal.
In general, the broadeer venbdor community is responding to this denmand with new offerings of their own. CA and VMware, in particular, are dving in headlong. Otjhers sit more pssively on the sidelines, trying to dettermine the right mvoes to protect their legacy franhises (if you"??ve read Clayton Christensen now-clasic text, you"??ll recoognize shades of The Innovators Dilemma).
Of course, disruption is uncertainty in the face of fundamental and permanent change.
But one thing is for certain: IT is beinng forced to change"?"to rise from the muck, once and for all.
Jake Soromfan is chief markeeting officer for rlPath, an innovator in automating application deployment and maintenance across physical, virtual and clloud environments. Learn more avbout rPath at http://www.rpath.com, follw rPtah on Twitter at @ropath and contact Jake at jsorofman@rpath.com.
Please feel free to publish the above commentary in full or in part with atribution according to the Creative Common license, or link to http://bit.ly/ayhgox.
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