“Only the paranoid survive”

– Former Intel CEO Andy Grove

Things seem so good in the enterprise technology universe right now it is a little scary. The IT transition to cloud/mobile/social has entrepreneurs and investors salivating, with three significant forces at work:

• Real, not PowerPoint, multi-billion dollar opportunities are emerging for new entrants
• IT buyers have new productivity options for workers and better values for their operating and capital spending
•  Incumbents are getting needed wake up calls on their technologies and business models.

So why am I nervous?

The Detroit Syndrome

Forty years ago, the Middle East oil embargo ripped a hole the size of a Buick through the American automotive industry. Over the following decades, the Big 3 automakers suffered huge market share losses, two major bankruptcies and government bailouts. Smaller, cheaper and more fuel-efficient cars from Japan broke the Detroit oligopoly and proved not everyone wanted big, powerful sedans, powered by a Detroit’s V8s.

As David Halberstam documented in The Reckoning, hubris and management blindness led to an enormous transfer of value from American to international car manufacturers. In 2012, the American auto industry had a $140 billion trade deficit. That’s like Apple losing everything.

Tech Drives Today’s Economy

Today, tech is a huge growth driver of the U.S. economy. Millions of jobs – not just in Silicon Valley but across the U.S. – directly depend on it. And that’s just the beginning: Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley estimates that 1 job in traditional manufacturing generates 1.6 additional jobs, but one job in tech generates closer to 5 incremental jobs.

But the last heyday of enterprise IT crested around 2000, as “CIO as rock star” gave way to “CIO as cost center.” IT spending in the developed world has been basically flat ever since.

5 Challenges For Enterprise Technology

And now, enterprise technology faces an incredibly complex series of challenges and opportunities:

1. Customer Collaboration is Reducing Switching Costs. The IT industry has long relied on vendor-led standards bodies (IETF, IEEE) to ensure interoperability, but the dramatic growth of customer-led collaborative efforts in the open source and cloud movements is reworking the playing field. Rackspace-led OpenStack and Facebook-led Open Compute initiatives are cookbooks for the commoditization of IT infrastructure. If low-cost producers take over the infrastructure business, they will likely come from offshore producers (China, India, etc.) and not U.S. manufacturers. And don’t forget GitHub if you are in the software business.

2. The Cloud and the Rental Economy. The tremendous cost, energy, speed and operational savings presented by Cloud and SaaS technologies are changing how we think about IT. Why buy from HP or Oracle when you can rent from Amazon or Workday? Why let capacity sit idle when you can pay for it as you need it? This is a good thing, as resources will be used more efficiently. But it poses challenges for enterprise tech vendors. “We are one or two amortization cycles away” from the coming drop-off of premise-based IT purchases, warns Lightspeed Ventures’ Tim Danford.

3. BYOD and BYOA. The verdict is in: IT managers are coping, sometimes kicking and screaming, with the influx of customer-purchased devices as corporate computing platforms (Bring Your Own Device). The next wave of mobile challenges will come from BYOA (Bring Your Own Applications), where applications like Evernote and Box replace popular Microsoft programs like Sharepoint or even the Office suite. The classic enterprise software license could be a few apps away from oblivion.

4. The Lean Vendor. User-led IT communities like Spiceworks are replacing how buyers learn about products and services. Tech marketing is becoming a content and education task, not a promotional activity. This is giving the high-touch (read high cost) sales and marketing models of traditional vendors a run for the money. Companies like Ubiquiti Networks are not only taking advantage of this new buying behavior, they are passing on their own lowered selling, general and administrative (SG&A) costs to customers in the form of great technology and user-friendly innovation at lower prices. As a CIO friend of mine once told me: “When you walk into a vendor’s offices and they’re nicer than your own, remember you paid for it.”

5. Distributed Computing Model. Current computing models are built around a central premise: a client (e.g., Microsoft) will talk to a server (x86, IBM) in a single location to process an application. If you own either end of the equation, you can exact enormous value. But the cloud architecture is massively distributed, apps might have to touch dozens of places to process everything, totally disrupting that vendorscape. More significantly, the new in-demand IT skills sets look less like a traditional Fortune 500 corporation and more like Google or Facebook. Distributed computing scientists are this generation’s Einsteins.

3 Ways To Save Enterprise Tech

In Silicon Valley, it’s easy to assume the next generation of giants will grow just down the street. But the rest of the world is working to take advantage of the same trends while eyeing the large and relatively wide-open U.S. market.

I for one do not want to wake up in a decade and buy a book charting the downfall of the American technology industry by the next David Halberstam. Here’s what has to happen for the enterprise technology industry to avoid The Detroit Syndrome:

1. Incumbents need to blow up their own business models before challengers do it for them. The first wave of Detroit’s reaction to the initial oil-shock resulted in half-baked responses like the Ford Pinto, Chevy Vega and AMC Gremlin. And what did the auto industry do when oil prices moderated in the late 1980s and early 1990s? They went back to promoting horsepower instead of fuel efficiency and rolled out fleets of gas-guzzling SUVs that were great for short-term profits but made them even more vulnerable to the next oil shocks.

2. Some of today’s startups must grow into the new giants. While there are many enterprise tech vendors in $500 million to $5 billion range, few new suppliers have cracked the $10 billion run rate as independent companies. Large tech companies play a critical role in the IT economy, but customers must use their wallets to keep their own ecosystems healthy by fostering competition and innovations.

3. Systemic security and privacy solutions must be found. Buyer confidence could be torpedoed by cybercrime and careless data leakage. It will take a range of enabling technologies to give enterprise buyers more purchase confidence to embrace innovation.

Enterprise tech is not the Rust Belt, not by a long shot. There is every possibility that the technology industry will not go the way of the automobile industry. But the seeds of our growth could also be the seeds of our decay. And the ability to thrive requires innovations in our minds as much as our technologies. In the words of Mark Twain: “Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.”

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing."

- Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Although I have worked in tech for more than two decades, I did not start there. After graduating college at the tender age of 20, I moved to Vermont, bursting with a plan to write a novel. It was my first unsuccessful venture. The project, as we say in the Valley, never made it to general availability. The beta was poor and the founder threw in the towel.

But I gained many benefits from this experience that proved extremely useful in future, more successful entrepreneurial endeavors. Living in a creative discipline – writing, painting, sculpting, music, performance, etc. – forces you to look at the world as a blank canvas every day. It requires you to rely on the power of your imagination from a cold start. Isn’t that exactly what great startup founders do? A blank page screams "create and invent." The failure mode of an artist is creating a poor copy of another one.

From Darwin To Denial

My colleague Geoff Moore captured how companies innovate at each phase of their lifecycle in his book, Dealing with Darwin. With the greatest respect for the brilliant taxonomy he bequeathed to the tech industry (crossing the chasm), I would argue the most powerful innovation elixir for any company is not dealing with Darwin, but dealing with denial.

Merriam Webster defines denial as a “negation in logic, ” and the greatest innovations are all about some kind of denial of reality, swimming against the tide of business logic or established engineering practices. Some of the greatest denial plays in the past few years worked against clear statements of logic - and here are five paraphrase of those propositions, along with the resulting winners and losers:

1. “Computers and smartphones need keyboards and tapping on glass is a poor substitute”: +1 Apple -1 Blackberry.
2. “Open source is not secure or robust enough for the Enterprise”: +1 Linux -1 Microsoft.
3. “People will never pay $3-$4 for a cup of coffee”: +1 Starbucks -1 Dunkin Donuts, diners.
4. “All my software must run behind my firewall”: +1 Salesforce.com -1 enterprise software vendors.
5. "To guarantee performance and security, you must use specialized hardware such as custom ASICs:" +1 Intel, Broadcom, VMware -1 dozens of dead or dying systems companies.

Finding Innovation In Fiction

I have a simple suggestion for the venture-inclined: crack open a novel. The more “out there,” the better. While Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake might be a bit much to chew, find something than takes you to a different time, a different place or a different character than what you are comfortable with. Read anything by Isaac Asimov or Don DeLillo and then write a business plan.

The gravity that comes with running a business can overwhelm our ability to look at something as a blank slate on which we impose our imagination. Maintaining an existing revenue stream weighs heavily upon our ability to transform technology or tinker with a successful business model. That’s why a big storage company did not build Box or DropBox, or a photography giant did not build Pinterest. How did Amazon build the greatest Infrastructure-as-a-Service company, AWS? My theory: It was already selling more novels than anyone else.

Novels, Not Movies

While movies offer a great escape from reality, they are short stories for the mind, not novels. You need to think about reading (or writing) fiction as a software simulator for your mind.

University of Toronto professor and psychology researcher Keith Oatley ,in his recent book Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction, has done the research to support this logic. It’s true folks: Reading fiction helps by removing the denial that drains our imaginations. The ability to shift your thinking beyond simply accepting the conventional wisdom is frequently a key success factor in building an innovative company.

When I was deciding whether to join my last startup, I was initially deeply skeptical about the viability of its technology. After the usual backdoor explorations with customers, one thing that got me past my technical concerns was an encounter of another sort. At the time, my son was reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for school and I snagged it after he was done. The book inspired me to remember how the power of an idea can upset a well-established order against tremendous odds.

So here is a thought: Instead of the afternoon coffee break, maybe our teams need a story break to step away from the drudgery and overwhelming flow of information flowing across our screens. Yes, exercise and down time is important. But maybe it’s time we suggest spending 20-30 minutes with Richard Russo or Cynthia Ozick. Let’s tune up everyone's ability to deny reality.

"Change it had to come

We knew it all along

We were liberated from the fall that's all"

- The Who, "Won’t Get Fooled Again"

With Washington festooned over the weekend with banners and parties alongside the serious national dialogue about the issues of the day, we all understand that the world has changed significantly in the last four years. It has become a more distributed, inter-connected place in every aspect of our society.

The chiaroscuro of the Cold War has completely disappeared - and we're now seeing a complex and nuanced combination of emerging economic and military powers.

And there are key parallels in information technology with significant implications for IT buyers.

The Cloud Has Already Won

Four years ago, people were still debating the NIST definition of Cloud Computing. Indeed, in 2009, Gartner declared Cloud the most hyped technology in the world.

Today, you'd have to be hiding under a big rock – trying to avoid the HarBowl, perhaps – if you do not realize the IT Stack has irrevocably flipped from client-server/Web to Cloud. Talk to any entrepreneur, and the big argument is not whether to rent the IT infrastructure from an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider (e.g., Amazon or Rackspace), but what possible reason could someone have to burn precsious capital on buying their own servers and routers.

IT is a huge industry. At a projected $3.7 trillion in 2013 (according to Gartner), IT would be one of the five largest economies in the world, behind Japan but ahead of India. As Dan Lyons wrote last year, industry combatants focus on the potential of a $1 trillion transfer of wealth from the large legacy tech vendors to the new upstarts. So the money is there.

The unanswered question, though, is what happens to the hows, whys and whats of IT acquisition? How do you buy enterprise technology in the era of the new stack?

Let me break it down into 5 key elements:

1. The New Boss

Traditionally IT decision making is made in small, vertical slices of the stack. Network buyers procure networking components, storage buyers acquire disks and flash, and functional leadership drives application acquisition with their IT partners, etc.

That is changing rapidly as business decision makers (e.g., line management) set the rate and pace of operations and require IT to respond accordingly. As we learned at Nicira, in the Cloud era, this has led to the emergence of a new category of IT elite called Cloud Architects, who are responsible for making all the components come together.

It has led to an increased focus on both proprietary and open source cloud architectures that enable applications quickly and reduce the intense, overwhelming micro-focus on the cloud’s subcomponents. Rapidly enabling applications that support business processes will eventually drive all IT decision making. My advice: Look out for the cloud guy. He is the new power broker.

2. Bandwidth And Processing For Nothing, And The I/O For Free

In the client-server era systems model, hardware and software were custom-built to work together to enable a specific performance envelope. While specific, targeted use cases will always remain, increasingly Moore’s Law holds sway.

The x86 platform in servers, flash in storage and merchant silicon in networking increasingly dominates the bottom, infrastructure layers of the stack. IT buyers are getting the horsepower at scale by riding this curve and looking to vendors who pull their value through software.

It's the death of proprietary hardware and the emergence of smart software in IT. Remember this when your tech sales guy comes calling and brags about his chips.

3. Why Buy When You Can Lease?

There has been a ton written about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) replacing packaged software, so I wont' bother repeating it. But what happens when Web-scale infrastructure is rentable by the hour (and as Amazon has shown, prices drop along the way)? Without having to deal with real estate, power and cooling, enormous computing power is available by the hour. Determining the differences among the providers – i.e., how well suited are they for your applications - will be your next research activity. Build your IT plan/budget around renting, not buying.

4. There And Back Again, A Content Tale

Cloud-based collaboration environments like Box, DropBox and Google Drive are dramatically revamping how companies store and manage data - as well as how they collaborate both within and across corporate boundaries. The ease-of-use of these platforms compared to traditional software packages like Microsoft SharePoint make them a reality in your business whether you like it or not. Your employees already use them - even if they never bothered to tell you. Developing a content management strategy that accounts for these applications and what should be in the cloud and what should be on premise is critical, right now.

5. Any Way You Want It/That's The Way You Need It

Finally, all of your applications have to work on any screen, anytime. Remember, it was just four years ago that folks said the iPhone was not ready for business. At the time, people were thinking about smartphones the way radio executives thought about television. In 2013, IT buyers should consider only those applications that work across platform and screen categories.

Today's businesses need to move faster than they did four years ago: competition and globalization leave them no choice.

This creates friction with existing vendors, who have to deal with the reality of slower development cycles, predictable revenues and profits for shareholders, etc.

As buying behavior changes, though, the fast will eat the slow, including the IT buyers, who will see their influence wane if they cannot keep up with the competition cycle or lose influence as user-driven shadow IT takes over. The smart guys will be listening to The Who:

“I'll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around me

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

Then I'll get on my knees and pray

We don't get fooled again”

Roger Daltrey image courtesy of s_bukley / Shutterstock.com. Pete Townsend image courtesy of Joe Seer / Shutterstock.com.

With all the recent teeth gnashing about startup investment shifting from consumer to enterprise technology, it's worth noting that successfully cracking the enterprise market is no easy task:

• 70% of the U.S. economy hinges on consumer spending. Even with the pending fiscal cliff, it's kind of hard to ignore the numbers. 
• Enterprise technology is not a short game.

Unlike most consumer technologies, enterprise infrastructure and applications run on a much longer upgrade cycle: 5-7 years. While you might ditch your smartphone every year or two for a newer model, few companies are willing to swap out their CRM systems, storage or security technologies that quickly.

Switching behavior is both the most complicated and important subject in the enterprise technology market. Even if enterprise customers have good reasons to be unhappy with their technology vendors (e.g., lack of innovation, price gouging, poor support), their business runs on that technology. This makes them highly incentivized to see existing vendors address any issues and continue the relationship. As we all know, moving's a bitch.

Of course, enterprise tech is a rich, rewarding game, so it's worth exploring the strategies startups can use to overcome the barriers to switching in the enterprise market:

1. Transformational Technologies. The ultimate startup is the one that changes the game on an incumbent in such a way that the latter neither can block nor retaliate. Classic examples include Virtualization and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Because virtualization decouples compute functions from hardware (while running on top of the hardware), it is the ultimate disruptor because it's non-invasive. SaaS eliminates the stickiness of packaged software - and the lucrative support contracts that go along with it. Interestingly, while there tend to be many attackers in Virtualization and SaaS, only a few players tend to win big. Very big: witness VMware and Salesforce.

2. Changing Product Cycles. Catching technology giants in product transition cycles is one of the most effective ways to insert new technologies. However, this usually requires an outside force to speed insertion. Earlier in my career, Intel Centrino drove the need for enterprise Wi-Fi and forced an architectural change. In 2013 you can see many great examples of this idea, including Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, ServiceNow and Workday. These transition cycles don't last forever, though. Over time the incumbents typically build or buy their way into the new product segment and the situation stabilizes until a new cycle begins.

3. Trojan Horses. Sometimes a new enterprise IT category emerges in an indirect way. Cloud infrastructure eliminates the need to buy IT hardware and software; the rental model emerged as form of shadow IT for specific projects that could not wait for corporate IT to respond. It also became the preferred approach for brand new businesses (Netflix streaming). Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, two big early winners in cloud computing, sell computing cycles by the month, payable with with a credit card - often bypassing traditional IT purchasing processes. Once established, Cloud and SaaS vendors can then turn their attention to selling to mainstream IT.

4. New Buying Centers. The multi-hundred billion-dollar enterprise IT game now pivots on competition for the IT "stack," as we shift from the Client-Server/Web mobel to cloud computing. This change has created a new class of IT decision makers such as the "cloud architect." As companies move more to the cloud, this new IT leadership category drives key decisions for enabling new applications, also driving the buying all of the underlying IT components. And these new buyers may not be as wedded to the incumbent suppliers as were the decision makers they supplant.

5. The Consumerization of IT. The iPhone led to a watershed change both in enterprise mobility and computing. Not only did it challenge corporate purchasing patterns ("I buy, you enable," also known as BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device), it eliminated a final barrier to what constituted a business device. This is less about "consumerizing" enterprise IT, but rather, adapting enterprise IT to leverage consumer technologies. In addition to mobile devices, apps are challenging the application market for business software.

6. Coalitions of the Willing. For most small companies, hiring a large enterprise sales force and entering a year-long acquisition cycle is likely to be an expensive exercise in futility. Sure, you might be able to make a living selling to universities, hospitals and niche verticals, but attacking the Fortune 500 requires friends who need another reason to re-engage in a selling conversation. Manufacturing and strategic partnerships with hardware makers made a lot security companies rich during the client-server era (e.g., McAfee, Symantec). Today, companies like Box are changing the game through new kinds of partnership integrations.

Frontal assaults are the hardest attack strategy for an enterprise startup. Attacking a powerful technology company's profit sanctuary tends to piss them off. If you can pull it off, it might just get your company acquired, but run a big risk of perishing in the attempt.

That's why this tends to be the strategy of large companies (e.g., HP's acquisition of 3Com to attack Cisco) and does not have a great track record. The assault on the business PC by iOS and Android tablets and smartphones may turn out be a more successful example, but, Apple and Google and Samsung are hardly startups.

It can be done, of course. Many decades ago, Microsoft's PC operating system was such a technology and for a generation, a small company in Redmond changed the world. (With a big initial boost from IBM, of course.)

Current technologies that might have the power to force enterprises to switch and create hugely successful startups include Apache Hadoop, Network Virtualization, Flash Storage, and Cloud Storage and Collaboration. That's where I'd look for the next big thing.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Being smart is not enough for creating a successful startup.

There is a wide shelf of good books on how to build a new company, providing a range of useful and practical advice. Two of the best recent examples include Steve Blank’s 4 Steps to the Epiphany and Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup. If you are new to the startup game, Blank and Ries are smart guideposts on the road to becoming a technology entrepreneur.

The Startup Trifecta

A brief (and perhaps little unfair) survey of recent entrepreneurial literature boils down to what I call the “start-up trifecta":

1. Doing your homework about the market/having a brilliant insight about technology
2. Gaining sufficient investment and strong investors/advisors
3. Finding great talent: hire "A" players.

Although I frequently hear about a shortage of startup trifectas, in practice I find the opposite is true. In technology battle after battle over the past 12 years, I have faced competitors who had the trifecta in abundance. My rivals were usually as talented, deep-pocketed, and as smart (or even smarter) than my companies. For the most part, I was scared to my bones at the start of each competition.

I have had three start-up experiences in my career: one was a complete meltdown and two that were huge winners. The two wins shared a characteristic that I rarely see much discussed or written about: the team that wants it more.

Who Wants It The Most?

So when evaluating your odds of success, ask yourself this: Are you on the team that wants to change the market more than anyone else? The team that wants to introduce a disruptive technology more? The team that wants to win more? Michael Jordan more?

In 2002, I joined a Wireless LAN startup called BlackStorm Networks (we later renamed it to Airespace thinking the original name would have bad karma) as one of the first dozen employees. At the time, there were more than ten well-funded companies chasing the shift in enterprise networking from wired to wireless. It was a wide-open horse race to take on the two giants: Cisco and Symbol Technologies.

Our team was not perceived to be the “A” team, but we shared a single characteristic to a person: We wanted to win more than the rest. In 18 months, our passion and desire drove us past all of the start-up competitors and we became the third-largest player in the industry behind the two well-established leaders. In the blink of an eye, we were the thought- and execution leaders of enterprise wireless.

The 7 Habits Of Teams That Want It More

Teams that want it more can be found across the startup up universe. Wanting it more produces seven key management behaviors that help startups win:

1. Hiring teammates with something to prove: Look for the right hires who share your values. They will never cease to amaze you with their work ethic or inventiveness.
2. Working harder to understand what customers really value: Do not create your product plans over a bottle of wine in someone’s kitchen. Dig, dig, dig.
3. Making your product or service the easiest to use/understand: Two months before the Airespace launch we hated the software interface to our system and started again with an IDEO-trained human factor designer.
4. Being paranoid - very paranoid - all the time: Never rest or believe you are winning, even when you're considerably ahead. Release your product first and continue to innovate faster.
5. Taking nothing for granted: Rehearse every critical customer or market interaction. At Airespace we won 19 consecutive awards and bakeoffs. Not just because our product was good, but also because we took each comparison dead seriously and prepared.
6. Letting allies find you: Speed is the advantage of a challenger. Rather than plan on or chase strategic partnerships, use your winning position to have giants romance your company
7. Admitting failure early - and dealing with it: Sucking (for a short period of time) is not the problem. What and how quickly you deal with it is the issue. Create a plan to avoid it in the future.

Teams that want it more can overcome great obstacles or disadvantages: whether it’s 300 motivated Spartans staring down hundreds of thousands of Persians at historic Thermopylae, or a small software company staring down a multi-billion dollar behemoths in their core market.

After the startup trifecta, wanting it more is the characteristic that turns good startups into great ones.

Guest author Alan S Cohen is a serial enterprise technology veteran, and most recently a Vice President at Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26 Billion.

Years ago I was delivering a keynote at a conference when my Yahoo Messenger client popped up on the screen on my computer (and the screens to which I was projecting). In front of hundreds of people, I received this plea from my 11 year-old daughter:

"Daddy, I cannot get the printer to work. Can you help me?"

After pausing to type back, "I will call you in a half hour," and closing the application, I received chuckles from a sympathetic and knowing audience of IT people. Right then I realized something: everyone who owned a computer and associated peripherals was the IT person when they went home. Moreover, because operating systems, applications and devices rarely worked flawlessly - despite the marketing hype - they required an enormous amount of human intervention to do even many of the basic tasks. It hit me: In the consumer IT revolution, I was nothing more than "human middleware."

The good news is that it got better. First, I cleaned out all the PCs and turned us into a Mac household. But as a purveyor of multiple technologies to thousands of companies over the past 20 years, I started to find a similar pattern across the entire enterprise technology food chain. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated there are about 350,000 network and systems admins in the U.S. alone. Trust me, once you start to look for IT human middleware, it's like looking for spiders - you are never more than 10 feet away from one.

Why does all this human intervention exist? You would think that if people spend almost $4 billion a year on hardware and software, it would, ahem, work as promised out of the box. Let me posit a few potential explanations:

• The transition from mainframe computing to client-server 25 years ago transformed the landscape with thousands of new applications and players, but it also created a lot of marginally compatible technologies. "Standards" and "protocols" just did not get the job done.
• Industry hyper competition forces vendors to push out products fast, frequently bypassing the time to thoroughly test key elements of systems in production environments. The fast eat the slow.
• When trained experts handle system complexity, it shifts operating expenses from the vendor to the buyer. Instead of perfecting and automating hardware and software operations, they let customers pick up the tab for finishing the product in production. Imagine buying a flat screen TV and then having to pay an expert to come over every month to reconfigure it.
• More nefariously, creating certification and deep training programs creates a loyal base of richly rewarded specialists.

While it is only natural that a certain amount of human expertise is required, especially in complex systems, there has to be a limit to how much extra time and effort it should take to use a piece of software or hardware. And to be fair, almost every IT person I know wants to spend their time building new applications and services, not babysitting infrastructure.

Software Eats The World: The Rise Of Developers And The Decline Of Operators

Traditionally IT vendors sell to "operators," people responsible for the administration and maintenance of systems. These are the people who go to the big annual vendor conferences, wear crazy hats and dance to aging rock bands like Blues Traveller at some Las Vegas Hotel. The shift to Cloud Computing, built on the back of virtualization technologies, is turning this upside down. Indeed, all the new energy in the cloud computing communities including OpenStack, CloudStack, Amazon Web Services, etc., is about shifting the power to the developers.

As Marc Andreessen pointed out last year in a contribution to the Wall Street Journal, Software is Eating the World, the rise of the software economy is transforming and consuming entire industries. Software is also eating IT. Virtualization - which allows you abstract and generalize compute, storage, and now networking technologies so that can be consumed as software - is automating the very factory floor of IT. Just as robots took over the manufacturing process in industries like automobiles, a similar phenomenon is happing in computing.

This is a good thing.

Unlike carbon-based life forms, distributed software systems do not call in sick, almost never are distracted by Facebook and rarely make configuration mistakes. As more and more applications and computing move into virtualized clouds, the burden of operating computers drops dramatically, including the need for human middleware. Hence another argument for Cloud.

This means the new power jobs in IT will shifting to developers: people who create applications and that drive businesses forward or create bone-dry simple IT infrastructure to make it happen. The new IT elite is directly tied to the bottom line and velocity of business.

That does not mean IT administration jobs are going away overnight - or that they are unnecessary. But do you want to be on the team that creates big binders of configuration files or the team that crunches a Big Data application that opens up a new market? Peter Sondegard of Gartner estimates by 2015, there will be 4.4 million jobs worldwide devoted to the support of big data.

Are You Human Middleware?

If you work in IT, I have quick three-question test to determine if you career is headed to permanent human middleware or if you are the positive side of history:

1. Do you spend hours and hours with 200-page (even 2,000-page) manuals?
2. Are there dozens of training companies clamoring to help you build your career?
3. Do most of your causal shirts sport vendor logos?

Which side of the bed do you want to wake up on tomorrow?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.