Tech talk – the taxonomy of yesterday
- Summary:
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Both sides of IT – the vendors and the users – continue to struggle in finding a common language to define what IT can off in business/practical terms, and so continue to hide behind tech talk, even though it is becoming increasingly useless at describing what users actually require, or what vendors can offer them.
A few days later, a morning spent at the Rackspace Solve conference demonstrated that some of the issues underpinning that growing inability of established software vendors to meet the changing needs of business users remain tenaciously in place, even when vendors have set out to remove or bypass them.
Verma agreed that the traditional legacy software business model remains geared to meeting the needs of an important, but dwindling, community of the top quartile of individuals - those with the capabilities to understand complex technologies, their applications and their interactions.
He is also aware, however, that the traditional big systems/enterprise marketplace that has been Tibco's core business for many years, is changing. Greater business agility means that users need applications and services in production as near to 'now' as possible - the three-year applications upgrade cycle is fast becoming a thing of the past - and they need to define and exploit those applications in their own terms, not those of the technology that has created them.
This means that traditional applications vendors need to change to match what is happening for users and Tibco's product focus, while still broadly targeting 'integration', now encompasses not only full services such as analytics, event processing, customer loyalty and service composition but also a wider range of tools that build not just integration but intelligent collaboration that now stretches into the Internet of Things (IoT) arena.
The market is moving, so be 'there' waiting
Verma accepts there is a strong need for Tibco to change because that combination of marketplace and vendor change is moving the focus away from serving the needs of that upper quartile.
The buying marketplace now is shifting to the business managers, who no longer have the time to work with IT departments to perform complex syntax translations to convert what they require in business terms into the language that applications developers and enterprise software vendors understand.
At a time when an application can be identified for a specific task, tweaked minimally to tailor it to that purpose, installed, run successfully and profitably and then discarded, all within a few weeks, following the traditional software development models no longer cuts the mustard.
This is why Verma sees the traditional enterprise software vendors as having to take more of a back seat. They will be no less important, but now as suppliers of core technologies to other players. These vendors have built complexity on top of complexity as their technologies and markets have developed, but at the same time, they have found that their marketplaces have also developed and changed - become more diverse, less dependent on specialist applications and less technology-proficient.
They now need not just more support, but support from those that understand their specific market needs. Even for the largest software vendors, now is the time of the partner community, the companies that understand their customers' specific business needs in the terms those business users understand.
The meeting with Verma provided an interesting metaphor for what this means for the vendor community. We dined at a restaurant well known to Verma when he is in London. He asked for a list of foods that were not all on the menu and, instead of saying 'no', the staff not only said 'yes', but added input and suggestions of their own from their experience of the food and Verma's past preferences.
That is what users now need - what they are seeking, delivered in a timescale and style that meets that need - by people who know what the customer is talking about.
What they no longer need are the old responses of the legacy IT software vendors, many of which are still at the stage of saying 'no/can't/shan't/bah humbug' or maybe 'well, it might be possible, but first you'll have to pay for a new kitchen to be built to make it in'. Many of them see themselves as 'award-winning' restaurants, while most of the customers simply want their choice of relishes on a properly cooked burger.
Knowledgeable partners are the way, now
One of the companies that falls into that partner community role is Rackspace, which not only has partnerships with many legacy software vendors, but also many cloud service providers, including the big daddy of the all, Amazon AWS. It also holds an interesting place as the potential hoster of many more partner businesses, though these may mark a subtle, but fundamental change in orientation of who they partner. The partner may well be the end user at least as much as any vendor, with the cloud partner acting as an intermediary service aggregator and orchestrator.
Rackspace's Chief Technology Officer, John Engates, spoke at Solve, the company’s recent London conference showed that he too basically understands the changes that are occurring and what they imply. In particular he referenced the need for users to move towards digital transformation.
But he then somehow slipped back into the position of offering more technology solutions, expressed in technology’s terms, and missing the point that layering more technological complexity on to an existing high level of technological complexity is no longer the right answer.
I have still to make up my mind why this was. Could it have been a lapse into safety and well-understood terms, or was it a well-judged reading of the mood and needs of the audience? Or is it that the users are so conditioned by the universal blandishment of, 'Have some more technology and it will all come right in the end', that they do not yet want to listen to anything else?
Engates did raise two important questions that business managers now need to answer:
Who are the experts in any company that can make things better for the business?
How is the business going to make use of them?
Engates even identified the big failing in most businesses as being the lack of expertise in understanding and exploiting this increasingly thick technological soup. For a second I thought he would raise, what to me is, the obvious point - that the vendors need to face up to this problem and provide both development and management tools in the taxonomy of the users, rather than just dumping more levels of complexity on them.
He outlined some of the steps Rackspace is looking to take to help users with digital transformation, starting by positioning Rackspace as the available experts for those businesses that lack their own.
While it can be argued that this positioning is no different to that of any of the major software vendors it does have a degree of validity. The mix of cloud delivery, its own areas of expertise, and its potential to host other service providers with specialist skills, puts it in a position to be the portal to a solution for many business users.
Not only can it be an aggregator of service packages selected from its own partners, but an aggregator of aggregations selected from within its own hosted service provider customers.
In addition, the company is at last setting out to pull its IaaS and managed cloud services together, something that I and others have been saying they should do for several years. This should certainly put in the position of having the right resources in place to take over much of the core resource and technology management that most businesses would love to off-load.
Making this happen could lie behind the widespread rumours that the company is about to execute a buy out of the stock market by being acquired by a private equity company. This is an increasingly popular option amongst high tech vendors and service providers trying to make significant changes to their market approach and positioning that stock market players continually show they cannot understand. Ironically, this is the self-same route taken by Tibco two years ago, for the same reason.
Some additional pressure to make such a move could be the fact that the company’s 'gorilla' partner, AWS is, according to AWS chief evangelist Ian Massingham, now providing more abstracted tools aimed at speeding development and reducing complexity. This is pretty much the current Rackspace back yard, which means that it is certainly time to move to a new neighbourhood.
My take
Give this a year and it will be old hat. All the mainstream vendors will have `got it’ and so will the users. No-one in the mainstream user community will be talking much tech, for the taxonomy will have changed. But for now one can still hear the fingernails screeching on glass as the old tech taxonomies fight for existence.