Why I Find All Of This So Fascinating

It takes a certain level of sustained effort to write a worthwhile blog.

I know, I've been doing it for a while.  When I coach other people on the topic, I make sure that they fully understand the level of commitment and engagement required to write a blog that stands out from others.

I'm ready to take the plunge on this topic. 

My primary motivation is that the whole topic is so damn interesting to me -- and here's why ...

A Bit Of Context

I've been in the IT industry since I was in junior high school.  Given that I'm now 50 years old, I guess that makes me a charter member of the IT Crusty Old-Timer Club.

For the last 15 years, I've worked at EMC.  Most of EMC's business model has been selling traditional technologies in the traditional way.

But change is in the air -- I can see it everywhere today, and I expect more in the future.

IT services -- and the infrastructure that delivers it -- is fundamentally "in play".  More and more IT organizations are preferring to consume IT as a service, and not by buying and implementing traditional technologies.

Enterprising individuals smell an opportunity, and I see literally billions of dollars in capital flowing into various flavors of delivering IT propositions as a service over a network.

The industry has assigned all manner of terms to this idea: cloud, grid, utility, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and probably a few more that I forgot about.  Regardless of what you call it, the idea is the same -- rather than buying your IT the traditional way, why not consume it as a convenient -- and external -- service?

And any fundamental change in the IT industry fascinates me.  Sometimes it obsesses me.

When desktops first started sprouting up in the workplace, I was fascinated.  When the industry shifted from mainframes and minicomputers to UNIX, I was fascinated.  When I fully understood what the internet could do, I was fascinated.  When I started to appreciate the power of social media tools, I was fascinated.

And, well, I guess I'm fascinated again.

What Changes?

Part of my fascination has to do with the breadth and depth of the changes involved.

The technology changes. 
The distribution method changes. 
The value proposition changes. 
The consumption model changes.

The fundamental structure of the IT market changes.

My primary focus here will be around IT service provider business models for a simple reason: success in this space is demonstrated by people voting with their money.  Put differently, if you can't make money at it, why bother?

A Future Look Back

Since this isn't the first time I've started to blog around themes of transformation and evolution, I've had the experience of going back to that very first post I wrote as I begun.

Sometimes I have a good idea of where it's going to end up.  Sometimes I don't.

Either way, it's a fun ride ...

Comments

[excITingIP.com]

Very nice introduction. I guess its really tough to sustain interest in a specific topic or stream for a very long time. I really don't have the experience to say that, but with my little experience, one or two years does seem to be a long time!!

The service provider model of wanting to have a bite of every pie is pretty intriguing. I guess developing expertise even within the different areas of enterprise IT is very difficult! Sometimes IT managers spend a couple of decades to achieve that. So, the entire concept of network services over the cloud is quite slow to pick up in markets that are in the developing countries. But on the longer term, they might as well do better than expected. Perhaps that depends on how fast the expertise is gained by the service providers and how fast the cost of bandwidth comes down for organizations.

excITingIP.com