| February 5, 2010
Responding to change
Over the past few months the IT world has been confronted by mergers, takeovers, acquisitions, partnerships, inflection points, and game changers -- some exciting, others rife with tension and ambiguity. Even the industry analysts jumped onto the bandwagon with Gartner finalising its acquisition of AMR and the Burton Group and thereby eliminating two of the top independent groups catering to the buy-side.
Andy Grove described a strategic inflection point as "a time in the life of a business when the fundamentals are about to change". Companies today must try to understand both paradigm shifts and their inflection points -- when technology and market place disruptions create opportunity -- and adjust accordingly. We have experienced significant paradigm shifts in information technology over the past 40 or 50 years. From 1980 to around 2001 the transformation was driven by advances in integrated circuits, networking, and user-interface technology and included the rise of smart clients (PCs and cellular phones) and the Internet with broadband technology tying it all together.
This paradigm shift fundamentally changed both business and society. It was supported by venture-backed start-ups that were launched shortly before and during the shift (Intel 1968; Microsoft 1975; Apple 1976; Oracle 1977; 3Com 1979; Adobe 1982; Compaq 1982; Sun Micro-systems 1982; Cisco 1984 and then Netscape 1993; Amazon 1994; Yahoo 1994; EBay 1995; and Google 1998, and many more. All were game-changers in one form or another, some in several.
We are now in a relatively mature phase of that huge tectonic shift that includes social networking, SaaS, cloud-based application delivery models, and a host of security concerns.
Industry watchers say Apple's long awaited iPad tablet could reverse the fortunes of the tablet PC industry. Tablets are not new -- Hewlett-Packard has been supplying them since 2004; if there is a boom in tablet PC sales, HP is there and ready.
We used to say that the IT industry consisted only of hardware and software companies and rarely did they meet. IBM was probably the exception. Now HP's services have been greatly enhanced, thanks to its acquisition of EDS, and it offers a rich portfolio with enterprise integration services.
There is no doubt the recently-closed Oracle-Sun acquisition will also change the industry, although concerns have been raised by channel and supply chain partners of both companies. Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO, said in a recent press conference that Oracle's sales teams would be serving Sun's top 4000 customers and letting Sun focus on direct selling to its remaining 31,000 customers. Partners in Australia are receiving mixed messages in this regard.
We have started the new decade with a bang; many new technologies are ready to make a big impact. Some will be brand new, like Google moving into the mobile phone business. We can expect more collaboration, like Cisco, Netapp, and VMware to deliver new capabilities for the dynamic data centre. Strategic alliances between EMC, Cisco Microsoft, Dell, and VMware also will continue.
Change is pervasive in our society and is a fact of life in the IT industry. Change can cause unresponsive organisations to flounder. Change is about survival. Globalisation is one example of pressure to change -- with globalisation comes greater competition. Change is about making alterations to a company's purpose, culture, structure, and processes in response to the seen or anticipated changes in the marketplace. Good luck for 2010.
-- Len Rust RustOz@bigpond.com.au
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