In the recent years the change in a lot of industries have arisen from an traditional business approach, which was developed over decades to a software defined version of that. There are compelling reasons why this has happened.

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When the industry develops products often it takes decades that this comes out. Take cars for example, all development from cars currently in mass production are start to build and design in the last 5 -10 years. Updates will often go into the next generation of the product cycle.

This is obvious if it is mechanical, but on software it can be much faster adopted. A good example is Tesla Motors which changed the Industry with a concept building a computer in from of a car. Nightly software is updated over the air and new functionality is available for the drive or passenger. But not only this has changed also the selling of that kind of car is different. While for traditional car dealers it is a exercise to train all the sales personal on new function and features, new leasing models or service capabilities to explain this to the customers, modern companies change the sales structure to the internet with an easy to update and adjust model. This leads that options and selling capabilities more depend on the flexibility and creativity of the company, not on the salesforce and their adaptability. The new model traditional Enterprises stumble into demands deeply a adoption of an agile and innovative behavior and processes to leverage the demand and open new segments of making business with.

Why is this happen

Because it is possible. With the appearance of cloud and the models supported thru that, Startups have shown that it is easy to build business without a large invest into infrastructure or DC. Even more, in the past you have to ask investors for a large amount of money to build the DC now you can pay while you build your business. This is much more enabling the investment of the capital in the business model and not into the IT landscape. But this is only one aspect. With the commodization of IT resources, and the container based IT, it is much more cost efficient and reliable to build enterprise class IT with a minimum of investment. However, there is a trap many companies will fall into, which is standardization. Currently there is a believe that one cloud standard, driven by cloud providers, can be the right one, but history has shown that this will lead to more cost and will be replaces in time by an Industry association. We see this on the horizon with OpenStack already, which this is still far of enterprise ready. The key will also be more in the PaaS layer with open software, like CloudFoundry and Docker, which opens a broader Eco space for applications and operations.

Innovation HandIllustration by Dinis Guarda

So what about to enable the “New” Enterprise model

The new model will be driven thru innovation in software and applications. With my daily talks to large companies and customers many of them think about how to implement this two aspects into their business process modelling. Often it is driven out of the IT department, but the link to the business and the drivers are missing or simply not established. T I see large enterprises and global companies investing in application development thru the Line of Business and building a second IT knowledge, which is more enrich with the business than the agile development. This not only leads often to a wrong assessment of the best development environment, it also creates a new class of information islands. In the long run this will not be the right innovative approach for many enterprises, but it let adopt and compete with the new kids on the block, the startups, much better. My advise to the CIO and cloud architects is always to engage actively with the CIO departments and help them to change to a more agile and innovative model, we call that, continuous innovation, but also get in return the IT expertise to make the right strategic decisions for the company.

IT provider, like EMC and the federation, enables thsi process and guide also thru that, with various iterations EMC has possibilities to analyze the  current status of an IT department and show the path from a 2nd platform concept to the modern web scale architecture, the 3rd platform concept demands. Since this is not a “shoot once and forget” also in IT terms the “New” model is a constant change. Was it in the past a management of resources and strive form more synergy and “innovation” thru new HW/SW will be the next decade the IT departments more a broker of public and private cloud, may be also for other companies as an additional service.

How to proceed ?

It is not simple and has to be step by step, since the current change of the business model in many verticals not only driven thru development and operation aspects, it also deeply influenced thru big data concepts, which often lead to a Internet Of Things discussion. Silos and public cloud may be an answer, the key to success I see in many cases with a joint effort of the business units and the IT responsible people in the enterprise.