Welcome new Corporate Enterprise: Virgin America builds Clouds with Open Source
By Tarry Singh at 2 November, 2009, 1:26 pm
This confirms my faith and belief with the discussion I was having with the Malaysian official who is driving the Govt 2020 Vision on open source. It sounds naive and yes enterprise software with cool powerpoint slides may win the board rooms but today the new CIOs are not the traditionally older ones who just threw loads of dollars at you and you could deliver whatever warez you had to deliver — be it hardware with those shiny proprietary layers or software with its virtual shininess — it just changed.
Look at this young CIO, he was driven by need and he could have laid a new foundation to the enterprise that will eventually popularize and legitimize the public clouds that I am talking about, by 2012. New Corporate American, new Corporate Europe, new Corporate China and also those new nations like Brazil etc will rise and adopt the IT.
Why?
“Because IT has always been way too expensive, stupid!” - Anonymous
Time to lower down that bar and get on to making sense. As more sensible and pragmatic folks start climbing the ladder, more of such wisdom and more of the public clouds powered by your own, el-cheapo but technically el supremo stack will emerge. This will lead to the rise of “cabinet clouds“, where you could house those super-efficient clouds in your cabinets. No more throwing massive dollars out of the window.
The newness of those new corporate enterprise firms is that they will not be stupid anymore. Smart people will reside on smart positions. No more playing short, goals, bonuses and packages are all tied to your revenues and some life-long scheme where you don’t have to play hide and seek with yourself. New leadership thrown in with a cocktail of well regulated and controlled decision-making will certainly make it a lot less scandalous and distant, it will be less opaque and discolored and make the IT function retire to its role which is long due.
“Keep every vendor on tap and not anymore on top!” - Drunken Sage
We tricked ourselves into believing that the world would be shiny and good if we trusted and let the vendors fix it coz they sold us that crappy hardware. So what we do give everything out of our hands but yet keep all the risks of our staff, gear and just about eveything on the planet in our own house. It is good to have all that if IT is merely a function and not some gigantic dinaosaur where loads of people ran those servers.
Vendors were revered as gods and they came and then shone the lights in every computer. Every system became clean. You didn’t care, you threw some more thosands of dollars and everything was fine. Mentality today is changing as many NY french fries stores asking $0.15 for extra ketchup. That means that every consultant you hire, every vendor you let walk in your store is on tap and not anymore on top!
You as the owner of an airline business, of a manufacturing business, of a consumer business, of education sector, of a utility sector and even of that retail banking sector get to decide.
“What do you care about- your manufacturing business or shiny hardware/software?” - Neo, THE Consultant
Ask yourself this: “Since when did you or anyone decide that spending loads of money on hardware, server software, virtualization ware, application software, client desktop licenses, and you could go on and on with the toxicoware will truly enhance your business?”
Ask yourself this: “How much of IT potion do you really need in your business?”
Just Enough IT is what we all need.
“Is there a Agilometer in the house?” - Selma, The “Meterist” CFO
No really. Is there a measure of agility and that can tell you that buying loads of hardware and software truly did enhance and grow my business? So we added $1M worth of gear and our customer base grew by 20M and we grew 10% YoY. Some metrics please. Many traditional CIO/CTOs are being given the boot and the real folks are coming out in the open.
Many non-traditional folks,with exceptionally huge capacities of measuring performance are coming in the IT shops and doing the check on everyone. They will not rest and go as far as they can to measure you and your services till you drop. Cloud Computing is in fact a boon, if I got a monthly bill of consumption I’d be happy and alarmed at the same time as the CFO. And that is such a good thing to have on a monthly basis.
” All our dinheiros are belong to us!” - A reborn Enterprise CEO
The need to control your assets and your cash flow is not only urgent but also very necessary in the next decade which the new leaders are entering. This is a treacherous road and a typical real-time computing will also demand a real-time assessment of assets. Enterprise customer are not anymore willing to spend any more than required. No more extra stuff, no more bloatware. Lean and sustainable businesses which are driven to make all efforts greener will not be willing to spend endless dollars/euros/renmimbis on some software/hardware houses. They will want to spend every single nickel on their own houses.
In Closing
This is the end of the traditional and spend-as-you-much IT as we see it. By 2015 next decade many big names, that are for you and I household names, will be in the cemetery. Big names. I can start telling you which ones as well and you’ll be shocked: ” Gee Tarry, this company has the most cash today!” The forces and developments that will bind the social and corporate together will be not the current ones but some new firms that are taking birth in cafes in Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, Mumbai, Shanghai, Los Gatos, Dalian, Mayaguez etc.
Anyways for now, just look at this rising company and take their example. They have taken a totally different road and avoided the pitfalls of going through the hard/expensive path and chose the inexpensive yet path of freedom and right-sized technology.
Disclaimer: I advise CxOs (CIOs, CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CISOs) globally on such developments and this blog is read by them avidly.
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