Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
I was at a conference recently when I saw it. I sighed and shook my head.
A development manager from a large enterprise organization was explaining how
they had created a DevOps maturity model based on CMMI. They went on to
describe their current state of maturity and their plans to get to ‘full
maturity' in the next three years. He continued by explaining how they had
presented this plan to executive management and subsequently received
approval for a new ‘DevOps team.'
Many organizations are now looking to DevOps maturity models to gauge their
DevOps adoption and compare their maturity to their peers. However, as
enterprise organizations rush to adopt DevOps, moving past experimentation to
embrace it at scale, they are in danger of falling into the trap that they
have fallen into time and time again.
Unfortun... (more)
Two apparently distinct movements are in the process of disrupting the world
of enterprise application development: DevOps and Low-Code.
DevOps is a cultural and organizational shift that empowers enterprise
software teams to deliver better software quicker - in particular, hand-coded
software.
Low-Code platforms, in contrast, provide a technology platform and visual
tooling that empower enterprise software teams to deliver better software
quicker - with little or no hand-coding required.
Two disruptive approaches with remarkably similar value propositions. Except
that one emphasizes hand-coding while the other replaces it.
The obvious question: are we in for some kind of appdev battle to the death,
as the two disparate approaches fight for supremacy?
Or are we somehow setting ourselves up for a delightful Kumbaya moment, where
DevOps and Low-Code live together, hap... (more)
Getting Hybrid IT Right
By Charles Araujo, Intellyx Principal Analyst
We define Hybrid IT as a management approach in which organizations create a
workload-centric and value-driven integrated technology stack that may
include legacy infrastructure, web-scale architectures, private cloud
implementations along with public cloud platforms ranging from
Infrastructure-as-a-Service to Software-as-a-Service.
At Intellyx, we have a mantra that goes something like this: "We love
confusion in the market. It gives us something to write about."
Well, if confusion is what we like, Hybrid IT delivers it in spades.
The tech industry is a buzzword-creating machine, but the truth is that all
of these buzzwords serve a purpose. As an industry, we are in a constant
struggle to distill, comprehend and communicate new and complex ideas that
are arising at a dizzying pace. So the industry ... (more)
Silos Are Dead! Long Live the Silos!
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
Nothing unites any group of people like a common enemy. And since the move
toward digital transformation began - and IT transformation before it - a
favorite common enemy has been organizational silos.
It has been an oft-repeated mantra that in order to execute a successful
transformation of any kind, the organization must break through the silos
that have been the source of dysfunction and obstruction.
Everyone could agree that silos created unnecessary separation,
protectionism, and bureaucracy. No one would dare argue that having rigid
silos were somehow good for the organization.
Silos were, therefore, the easy target. They became the mantle onto which
leaders could lay all past transgressions, and, in so doing, they became a
convenient artifice to allow the leader to pro... (more)
Preparing for the Next Disruption
By Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
I'll never forget the day that I first encountered the Internet. It was 1989
when a friend who worked in aerospace showed it to me - and I immediately
ignored it.
I wasn't alone. Almost everyone missed the true impact it would have on the
world. I originally told this story in my first book, The Quantum Age of IT:
Why Everything You Know About IT is About to Change and went on to explain
how this encounter had precipitated the three market forces that had changed
everything.
These three market forces were:
The consumerization of IT - how consumer technologies changed the
expectations and perceptions of technology consumers The criticality of IT -
how technology moved from a back-office focus to powering every business
process, every customer interaction and virtually every element of the ... (more)
In 2003, Writer Nick Carr shook up enterprise C-suites around the world with
his seminal article for Harvard Business Review he provocatively titled IT
Doesn't Matter.
Fresh off the dot-com crash but before cloud computing took off, Carr
observed that the belief that IT's strategic value increases in parallel with
its potency and ubiquity was seriously mistaken.
His central thesis: "What makes a resource truly strategic - what gives it
the capacity to be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage - is not
ubiquity but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing
something that they can't have or do. By now, the core functions of IT - data
storage, data processing, and data transport - have become available and
affordable to all."
Carr then explained how proprietary technologies can provide strategic
advantage, but over time, technology become... (more)
A completely new computing platform is on the horizon. They're called
Microservers by some, ARM Servers by others, and sometimes even ARM-based
Servers. No matter what you call them, Microservers will have a huge impact
on the data center and on server computing in general.
What Is a Microserver...and What Isn't
Although few people are familiar with Microservers today, their impact will
be felt very soon. This is a new category of computing platform that is
available today and is predicted to have triple-digit growth rates for some
years to come - growing to over 20% of the server market by 2016 according to
Oppenheimer ("Cloudy With A Chance of ARM" Oppenheimer Equity Research
Industry Report).
According to Chris Piedmonte, CEO of Suvola Corporation - a software and
services company focused on creating preconfigured and scalable Microserver
appliances for deployin... (more)
Digital Transformation: It's the Customer, Stupid!
By Charles Araujo, Intellyx Principal Analyst
If you cannot explicitly articulate how investing in a new technology,
changing the approach or re-engineering the business process will help you
achieve your customer-centric vision of the future in direct and measurable
ways, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
At Intellyx, we spend a lot of time talking to technology vendors. In our
conversations, we explore emerging new technologies that are either
disrupting the way enterprise organizations work or that help enable those
organizations to cope with disruption.
The rate at which new companies and new technologies are emerging is
staggering, and it can be difficult to keep up - even for those of us whose
sole job is to do so. It's no wonder, therefore, that so many people draw a
straight line between the concept of digi... (more)
As today's digital disruptions bounce and smash their way through
conventional technologies and conventional wisdom alike, predicting their
path is a multifaceted challenge. So many areas of technology advance on
Moore's Law-like exponential curves that divining the future is fraught with
danger.
Such is the problem with artificial intelligence (AI) and its related
concepts, including cognitive computing, machine learning, and deep learning.
Today we have interesting but hardly revolutionary technologies like Apple
Siri and Amazon Alexa. And tomorrow? If you listen to the doomsayers, The
Terminator's Skynet or its killer robot kin will take over the world from us
puny humans.
While we cannot entirely disagree with the dire warnings of certain pundits,
the reality is that there is quite a lot of territory to cover between Siri
and Skynet. Even well before some kind... (more)
Digital transformation. Digital strategy. Digital leadership. Digital
enterprise. Digital customer journey.
It seems the list of things that have gone digital is unending and remarkably
broad.
Underlying all of these intertwined digital concepts? Unquestionably, some
kind of technology.
Digital technology.
Just one problem: nobody agrees on just what constitutes digital technology.
And without a grasp on what technologies are digital - or more to the point,
what technologies are not digital - we've built our entire digital edifice on
a foundation of sand.
Ones and Zeroes
We can all agree that the broadest definition of digital technology would be
technology that uses ones and zeroes to represent data. After all, bits - aka
binary digits - are where we got the word digital in the first place.
Using this definition, digital technology launched on Valentine's Day in ... (more)
Intellyx's 2017 Digital Transformation Predictions
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
Once again, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new year.
And many would say, not a moment too soon. With a series of tumultuous
elections around the world and an unusual number of celebrity passings, it's
been a rough year.
But there is at least one bright spot from 2016: Intellyx's digital
transformation prognostications were close to spot on!
As is our tradition, each year we review last year's predictions and make all
new fresh ones! This year, it is my turn to review Jason's 2016 predictions
and let you know what I see happening in the coming year.
A Look Back on a Year of Inflection Points
Our predictions for 2016 centered on one thing: inflection points.
We predicted that blockchain, IoT security and open source web scale
technology would all turn the corner... (more)
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